Infrastructure awareness.

ABSTRACTUbiquitous Computing designs infrastructures that weave into the fabric of everyday life, and become invisible by fading in the background. However, this invisibility keeps users from understanding and adopting them. To address this problem we introduce the notion of Infrastructure Awareness (IA). IA is the user's awareness about properties of an infrastructure. Our hypothesis is that IA facilitates the users' understanding of infrastructures, and thereby supports their adoption. This dissertation investigates three dimensions of IA: conceptual, methodological, and technological. The conceptual dimension defines IA in terms of an awareness model and a design space. The methodological dimension reflects on the usage of user-centred design when designing for invisibility, and proposes a new user-centred design activity for IA systems. The technological dimension creates two proof-of-concept applications, GridOrbit and GridNotify, to illustrate the notion of IA systems.