Invisibility and Visibility

Abstract

A vision of future daily life is explored in Ambient Intelligence (AmI). It follows the assumption that information technology should disappear into our environment to bring humans an easy and entertaining life. The mental, physical, and methodical invisibility of artificial intelligent tools and environments will have an effect on the relation between the activities of both, users and designers. The infiltration of reality with sensing, computing, transmitting and acting hardware will cause the construction of new meanings on interaction in general because the “visible” acting of people will be preceded, accompanied and followed by the invisible and visible acting of artificial intelligent tools and environments and their providers. Sociability in such an interaction world stretches between the feelings of “being in security” and “being in control”. Invisibility management could enable situated veiling and unveiling. Critical Transformative Rooms, where human and artificial actors can negotiate about the change of meanings, are the approach to deal with the users’ emotions of frozenness, despair, fear, doubt and trust.