Grand challenges for ambient intelligence and implications for design contexts and smart societies

This paper highlights selected grand challenges that concern especially the social and the design dimensions of research and development in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Smart Environments (SmE). Due to the increasing deployment and usage of ‘smart’ technologies determining a wide range of everyday life activities, there is an urgent need to reconsider their societal implications and how to address these implications with appropriate design methods. The paper presents four perspectives on the subject grounded in different approaches. First, introducing and reflecting on the implications of the ‘smart-everything’ paradigm, the resulting design trade-offs and their application to smart cities. Second, discussing the potential of non-verbal communication for informing the design of spatial interfaces for AmI design practices. Third, reflecting on the role of new data categories such as ‘future data’ and the role of uncertainty and their implications for the next generation of AmI environments. Finally, debating the merits and shortfalls of the world’s largest professional engineering community effort to craft a global standards body on ethically aligned design for autonomous and intelligent systems. The paper benefits from taking different perspectives on common issues, provides commonalities and relationships between them and provides anchor points for important challenges in the field of ambient intelligence.