The Semiotics of Smart Appliances and Pervasive Computing

Abstract

This paper presents Digital Habitats, a conceptual and methodological framework for analyzing and designing smart appliances in the context of pervasive computing. The concrete topic is a project in pervasive gaming for children. The framework consists of a set of theoretical concepts supplemented by diagrams for representing semi-formal models. We give a short overview of selected theories of play and gaming and apply the framework to an implemented simple pervasive game. Finally, we use the framework in a constructive man-ner to produce a concrete design of a new game. The result is dis-cussed and compared to other approaches. The main points are: (a) it can describe communicative as well as material acts plus the way they hang together, (b) it provides an explicit link between human activities and their spatial context, (c) it has an explicit dynamic model that pre-cisely describes the conditions for executing actions, and (d) it offers a typology of participant roles, based on linguistic theory, that supports design processes.