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Our environments and the products inhabiting these spaces become increasingly dynamic and interactive. A growing variety of consumer and professional products is being equipped with sensors, data storage capacity, information processing technology, actuators and new display technologies. Advancements in network and wireless communication technology begin to make it feasible to connect such products into smart environments that can sense and reason about user intentions, experiences and emotions in a natural setting and react and anticipate accordingly. In these smart environments humans will be continuously connected to each other and information will be available anytime everywhere. In order to investigate how these new technologies can be geared to the needs and wishes of humans, one should not only focus on the technological development but also investigate its consequences on human-product interaction and the changing role of humans as individuals and as community members. The technological development towards smart environments promises a world in which information is available anytime anywhere and with which humans can interact in a natural, multimodal way. It will introduce a large diversity of environments, ranging from natural environments to completely virtual ones with in-between different varieties of mixed and augmented realities. In addition, it will become increasingly more common that groups of individuals will be simultaneously immersed in and interacting with the same environment, both physically (e.g. smart rooms, smart homes) and virtually (e.g. Second Life, MySpace). Alternatively, humans will be allowed to collaborate at a distance while experiencing a sense of non-mediation, that is, they collaborate as natural as in physically close collaborating teams. This sense of non-mediation refers to the situation where smart environments will operate as transparent user interfaces. That is, they are invisible because they allow the user to interact through the interface at task level instead of with the interface. In this way, they may augment the user's capabilities. This will be the first school in a row in which we will explore these issues. This first school will present a broad multidisciplinary view of how fundamental insights into human physical and cognitive capabilities can be used to design human-centered technologies that can collaborate symbiotically with humans to enhance human capabilities well outside the range of normal biological variation. |