About • Events  • Publications • Partners • Links

The goal of the InterLiving project is to, together with families, study and develop technologies and artifacts for communication between generations.

Coordination and Partners
InterLiving is coordinated by CID (Centre for User Oriented IT-Design), at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Partners are INRIA (Institut Nationale de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique), LRI (Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique Université de Paris-Sud) in France and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland in the USA. InterLiving is funded for three years by EU’s program “Disappearing Computer”.

Aim
The aim of the InterLiving project is to develop technology that can contribute to bringing family members together. In order to do so we need to know what keeps families together.

We do not only need to know what an artifact that the families are willing to place in their different homes should do, how it should work. We need to get the whole picture also including the products' appearance and expression. We need to be able to design the artifacts in such a way that the families will accept to have them in their homes. This can of course include all kinds of aspects like status, exclusiveness, etc. The results could even involve “invisible” design.

Since we only have to consider the situation when the artifact is in the home we can really focus on the “needs and desires” that the families express. We do not have to consider other aspects such as: marketing, branding, manufacturing, distribution, disposal, recycling, price, etc.

Methods
InterLiving is a cooperative project between researchers from different scientific disciplines; ethnology, psychology, industrial design and computer science, and six families, three in Sweden and three in France. The cooperation with the families will in its first stage create understanding for the complexity for their geographic and communicative situation. In the second stage the researchers and the family members will together design useful and adaptable technology. We will mix reliable scientific methods and exploratory development. Examples of methods are ethnographic studies, interviews, video diaries, and “work-and-play”-workshops.

For more information feel free to contact:
interliving@nada.kth.se  •  2002-09-23