Sociotechnical Ambient Systems: From Test Scenario to Scientific Obstacles

Scientific advances have lead to an explosion in the number and functions of electronic devices used in everyday lives, throwing us into the world of ambient intelligence, as defined by Weiser 20 years ago in 1991 [WEI 91]. In this context, systems’ designs presuppose movement from a centered point on multifunction machines toward a set of devices with varying interactions that are distributed and dispersed in the environment, which can be accessed by interfaces, thrusting the user into increasingly realistic and mixed worlds. As a result, the individual and her/his social, physical, and organizational contexts are at the heart of considerations in the design of these systems, which must be adapted to users’ needs and behaviors. This human-machine coupling must be intuitive in correlation with the content of exchanges and multimodality. Some processes may also need to occur on demand in the network (system coupling) without the users’ outside control and must, in addition, be implemented by embedded autonomous entities acting collectively. These systems, consisting of human beings and components continuously interacting, may be physical entities or distributed devices. They are autonomous and have the ability to adapt to a human being’s task and to the available digital physical resources.