Recent developments in information and communication technologies have left interaction designand human-computer interaction (HCI) with something of a conceptual gap. The distinction between physical and digital spaces is increasingly blurred. Cloud-based services have enabled a separation of information content from device so that content can be accessed and manipulated across multiple devices and locations. The user experience (UX) frequently needs to deal with activities that transition across physical and digital spaces and ecosystems of devices and services. Designers can no longer prescribe the journey or curate experiences simply as isolated interactions. Instead, UX must be consistently spread across touchpoints, channels, and device ecosystems. Our contribution to the development of UX, interaction design, and information architecture is to appeal to the notions of cross channel user experiences and blended spaces. Information architecture is the pervasive layer that underlies interactions that cross services, devices and blended physical and digital spaces. Information architecture is the structure within which the UX unfolds. From this perspective, we highlight the importance of creating meaningful places for experience and navigation through blended spaces. Blended space, contextual blending, cross-channel, place, place-making, user experience, information architecture.
This paper formalizes an approach to the Internet of Things as a socio-technical system of systems and a part of the infosphere. It introduces a principle-based, human-centered approach to designing Internet of Things artifacts as elements of contextual cross-channel ecosystems. It connects the Internet of Things to the conceptualization of cross-channel ecosystems from current information architecture theory and practice, positing that the Internet of Things is both a formal, objective superset of any given ecosystem and a contextual, subjective subset of specifically instantiated ecosystems. The paper argues for the necessity of a transdisciplinary theoretical framework to promote a human-centered generative understanding of the Internet of Things phenomena and their consequences, in accordance with the Metamodel Methodology (M3). It proposes a phenomenologygrounded information architecture model detailing a set of 16 principles and secondary heuristics grouped according to an architectural perspective, which identifies guidelines that support the design of Internet of Things artifacts considering their objective characteristics; a human perspective, which identifies guidelines that support the design of Internet of Things artifacts considering subject/ object relationships and the production of meaning; and a systemic perspective, which identifies guidelines that support the design of Internet of Things artifacts as relational parts of information-based ecosystems. These principles and guidelines are meant to provide the foundations for a practice-based approach to designing the Internet of Things-enabled information ecosystems.
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