When technologies for distributed activities develop, in particular the rapidly developing mobile technology, a larger part of our time will be spent connected to our various distributed contexts. When we meet physically we bring technology, both artifacts and services, which enable us to participate in these non-local contexts. Potentially this is a threat to focused and efficient activities due to the intrusiveness of the technology. Our aim is to contribute to the restoration of a number of the desirable properties of traditional local technology-free contexts. The intrusiveness itself is caused by at least four typical phenomena that have influenced current technology: In the FEEL project, we have developed a system called “Focused, Efficient and Enjoyable Local Activities with Intrusiveness Management” (FEELIM) that constitutes an intermediate alternative between the technology-dense and technology-free environments, which addresses the problems cited above. This research is based on a collaborative and cooperative setting where problems of intrusiveness management are confounded by several users meeting and cooperating together as opposed to isolated users dealing with similar problems of interruption management (Chen 2004; Ho 2005).
The manifolds of spaces and places we are entering, populating, transiently crossing and eventually leaving (only to immerse in another subsequent context) as part of our daily activities in our personal, public and professional lives are undergoing a dramatic change. Although this change is taking place we are aware of it only in a limited fashion due to its unobtrusive character as illustrated in the statement by Streitz and Nixon (2005): "It seems like a paradox but it will soon become reality: The rate at which computers disappear will be matched by the rate at which information technology will increasingly permeate our environment and our lives".
We started the work reported on here with the ambition to create inspirational learning environments for design and architecture students in the spirit of Weiser’s vision of taking the computer “out of the box” and making computational resources augment a design studio environment ubiquitously. Computing environments are becoming populated by a rich and diverse set of devices and networks, many of them integrated with the physical landscape of space and artefacts. Early attempts to take the desktop metaphor of graphical interface design back to the real desktops and whiteboards by exploring new semantics of interaction was pioneered by Weiser’s group, as well as by Buxton and others (; ; ). The idea to have a new and more complex set of physical handles to digital media promised a richer interaction between people and technology, and, in line with Engelbart’s pioneering work on direct manipulation for graphical user interfaces (), a new set of generic interface building blocks would open up a new realm for design of interaction technologies.
