Intelligent Buildings International 2 (2010), 5–19, doi:10.3763/inbi.2009.0041

© 2010 Earthscan ISSN: 1750–8975 (print), 1756–6932 (online) www.earthscan.co.uk/journals/inbi

Pervasive informatics: theory, practice and future directionsKecheng Liu1*, Keiichi Nakata1, Chris Harty2

1Informatics Research Centre, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6BW, UK2Innovative Construction Research Centre, School of Construction Management and Engineering, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AY, UK

Pervasive informatics as an emerging interdisciplinary study focuses on how information affects human interaction with built environments. Pervasive informatics is different from pervasive computing in that its focus is on ICT-enhanced physical and social spaces, called intelligent pervasive spaces, rather than on the technology itself. An information-rich social interaction taking place within intelligent pervasive spaces offers a complex domain of study. Many theoretical approaches are relevant to the design of effective pervasive spaces. For example, a socio-technical systems (STS) approach is helpful to understand and support the provision and use of intelligent spaces and pervasive technologies. This article reviews some related contributing theories, including STS, computer-supported cooperative work and semiotics. Semiotics, the study of signs, symbols and information, is used to examine the efficacy of a built environment on physical, empirical, syntactical, semantic, pragmatic and social levels. The prototypical expression of ‘agent-in-environment’ allows analysis of the ontological dependency (or affordance) between the space and its capability. With an empirical example, the article illustrates how the semiotic approach is used in the design of pervasive spaces, which would lead to the further conceptual development of a pervasive informatics approach, including new methods and techniques.

Keywords: affordance; built environment; computer-supported cooperative work; intelligent agents; intelligent buildings; pervasive informatics; pervasive spaces; semiotics; socio-technical systems; sustainability

*Corresponding author. E-mail: k.liu@reading.ac.uk

INTRODUCTIONWhat’s in a name? When studying the interactions between people and the built environment they occupy, information plays an important role. Even interactions that on the surface seem purely physical, such as opening a window, sitting in front of a table or moving a chair, involve the processing of information, i.e., the warmth of the room, whether the window can be opened, or the position of the chair in relation to other occupants. When viewed from

a functional point of view, the built environment is full of information that can be utilized by its occupants. While such a viewpoint may not be new, to date there is no consolidated approach to study this phenomenon and to understand and design pervasive information environments for the benefit of their stakeholders and users. Pervasive informatics is a term that is developed in this article to represent this consolidation to advance our understanding and knowledge of this socio-technical domain. The purpose is

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to explore the emerging concept of pervasive informatics as a new field of research into interactions between intelligent pervasive spaces for working and living, and their occupants, or among the occupants in such spaces. Its objectives are to identify relevant theories that can contribute to and be further developed in pervasive informatics, review exemplary work that puts pervasive informatics into practice, and identity future research directions.

The article is structured as follows. In the next section, we discuss the notion of pervasive informatics. The concept of intelligent pervasive spaces discussed here is developed further in ‘What makes a space intelligent and pervasive?’. In ‘Relevant theories and techniques towards pervasive informatics’, we review a number of relevance theories, namely social-technical systems, distributed cognition and other concepts developed in computer-supported cooperative work. Another set of approaches based on semiotics is discussed in ‘A semiotic perspective of intelligent pervasive spaces’, followed by examples of practical implementations of semiotic approaches in ‘A case study in pervasive informatics: agent-based intelligent building control’. The article is concluded by discussing future research directions in pervasive informatics.

PERVASIVE INFORMATICSLet us begin by examining the constituent terms of this concept.

Informatics has been given many different definitions, often reflecting a long historical background and the varying domains in which the term has been used. Here, the focus is on the nature of information and on the interactions between information and people, rather than on technical or structural distinctions. Therefore, in this article, informatics is defined as ‘the study of information through its lifetime, relating the creation, management, distribution and utilization of information in scientific and economic activities’.1 Information in different forms is at the centre of our interest. This of course also encompasses computing and

information technology. Technology affords additional capabilities to the human agents or actors to interact with the environment in the theatre of information. In the course of its lifetime, information may be created, managed and distributed using technology or conveyed by it. Informatics seen in this way can capture more effectively the socio-technical complexity of information in human activities and across different sorts of digital and non-digital artefacts.

Pervasive is the adjectival form of pervade, which is to spread throughout or to permeate.2 Hence, pervasive informatics refers to the study of information that is pervasive in nature, and the environment in which information is or can be pervasive. More specifically, pervasive informatics is an interdisciplinary area of research focusing on how information affects humans’ interactions with aspects of the built environment. In this information-rich economy, humans benefit from the effective use of information in two interrelated types of environment: the built and the social. The built environment provides the physical infrastructure that mediates social interaction and social environments more broadly. But increasingly, information technology provides aspects of this role, for instance through internet-based interaction (from e-mail to social networking and online communities). The boundaries between the physical and informational become blurred when considering the continuing integration of computing technology into the built environment. Similarly, the boundaries between the social and the physical or informational also become blurred when considering the ways these artefacts (whether spaces or objects such as computers) play central roles in social interaction. In this sense, pervasive informatics contains common features with social informatics (Nakata, 2008) but with a specific focus in the built environment.

The built environment provides an infrastructure and spaces for human activities. It provides a physical ground on which social spaces can be constructed; therefore the value

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of the built environment is realized through the services it renders and the interactions the buildings mediate, enable or afford to people. These physical spaces are themselves provided by the artefacts that the construction sector produces, from large-scale civic surroundings to personal spaces; the social spaces are constituted by cultural settings, relationships and interactions between people which often rest on the physical layer. The key is that these social spaces are dependent on physical elements; in different ways they are constrained and enabled by the physical space. These could be direct physical restraints, such as non-opening windows restricting ventilation, or more complex and interpretative, such as unintuitive layouts of large buildings making way-finding difficult. The capability of a physical space to offer more enabling spaces for social interaction can be enhanced by introducing technologies such as smart devices and intelligent control systems. These can lead to an increased level of interaction between the space and its occupants – an interaction mediated by information flow between the space and the users.

A pervasive space therefore is characterized by the intense interaction between the occupants and the built environment. The interaction can be physical as well as informational. The protection and physiological comfort provided by the space and the act of controlling the building are physical; the enjoyment or satisfaction offered by, for example, high-quality decor, elegant layout of rooms, or the space responding to occupants’ instructions for building control, are informational. The interplay between the buildings and people is ongoing and pervasive, with the users immersed in the environment. A well-designed built environment can deliver spaces for enhancing certain interactions.

A pervasive space can also be ‘intelligent’, for instance in balancing the satisfaction of users and limiting environmental impact. When used as a modifier to a technical system, ‘intelligent’ often refers to the use of methods and techniques derived from artificial intelligence (AI) research, for example, ‘intelligent systems’. AI

in turn is a study of intelligence with the aim of creating it in the artificial. In general, something can be called intelligent when humans attribute a level of intelligence to the behaviour exhibited. Hence, intelligent pervasive spaces are pervasive spaces that exhibit intelligent behaviour; and that can change or adapt to the expectations of their occupants, or to other concerns in the pervasive space such as environmental impact. As such, intelligent pervasive spaces may have automated control mechanisms to achieve energy efficiency and sustainability, increase occupant well-being and quality of life (such as comfort), enhance their social value and that of their occupants (such as productivity), or combinations of these.

Putting this together, pervasive informatics as the study of intelligent, pervasive spaces encompasses a broad array of entities and interactions. The combination of the space, the actors and other artefacts within it and the information produced and exchanged is a complex system. When the notion of an intelligent space that reacts to interaction with human actors and other entities is considered, the complexity is further increased. Above all, this is a socio-technical system. Humans interact with other humans, but also with and through the space and the artefacts within it. The space itself may also ‘act’, reacting to the activities of and information from, the occupants. In such a space, these social and technical/physical entities are highly interdependent and the interactions occurring within them are mutually constituted by the social, physical and informational.

It is this complexity that leads us to develop an interdisciplinary and socio-technical approach to studying these intelligent, pervasive spaces. We now look in more detail at what makes a space intelligent and pervasive.

WHAT MAKES A SPACE INTELLIGENT AND PERVASIVE?THE NOTION OF INTELLIGENT PERVASIVE SPACESIntelligence in spaces is the utilization of information and communication technologies to enhance the performance of spaces; although

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there is no universally accepted definition of intelligence (Roth and Dicke, 2005). Intelligent spaces require a highly embedded computational infrastructure; they need many connections with the physical world in order for the users to interact extensively with built environments. To achieve such purposes, it is vital to incorporate the users’ requirements into the functions of the spaces (Coen, 1998; Peters and Shrobe, 2003). Intelligent spaces, sometimes described as advanced communication and computing environments, are emerging as an exciting new paradigm that includes different technical fields such as pervasive, ubiquitous and grid computing, as well as studies in other areas such as economics, knowledge management, usability and informatics.

An intelligent pervasive space is a ‘social and physical space with enhanced capability through ICT for humans to interact with the built environments’ (Liu, 2008). An alternative definition is ‘an adaptable and dynamic area that optimizes user services and management processes using information systems and networked ubiquitous technologies’ (Moran and Nakata, 2009). The spaces should be adaptable and automated to provide better services to meet the residential or business purposes. Such services include automatic environment control (e.g., heating, ventilation, air conditioning [HVAC], lighting, audio/video and security) through the use of information and communication technologies, and typically intelligent information systems and networked ubiquitous devices.

Intelligent pervasive spaces can be implemented by embedding pervasive and ubiquitous computing devices and computing infrastructure in the building infrastructure to satisfy user expectations. Pervasive computing is about making our lives simpler through digital environments that are sensitive, adaptive and responsive to human needs, with the graceful integration of digital technologies (Satyanarayanan, 2001; Saba and Mukherjee, 2003). Intelligent pervasive spaces can process information, sense the environment via sensors and communicate with other devices through wireless networks. They aim

to provide computing and communication services in a much more convenient, seamless, transparent and pleasurable way. A simple example of this is the automatic adjustment of heating, cooling and lighting levels in a room based on an occupant’s electronic profile.

RESEARCH IN INTELLIGENT PERVASIVE SPACESA building automation system (BAS) is an essential part of an intelligent pervasive space. Building automation describes the functionality provided by the control system. The control system is a computerized, intelligent network of electronic devices, designed to monitor and control the mechanical and lighting systems in a building. The BAS should reduce building energy and maintenance costs when compared with a non-controlled building. The BAS aims to provide a comfortable climate and adequate lighting, often with zone-based control so that users on one side of a building have a different thermostat from users on the opposite side. A temperature sensor in the zone provides feedback to the controller, so it can deliver heating or cooling as needed. Web interfaces allow users to remotely initiate an override on the BAS. Lighting can be turned on and off with a building automation system based on time of day.

Intelligent pervasive spaces have the following features:

● a social and physical environment in which people can interact;

● automatically computing and dynamically adjusting to the spaces to support different activities;

● communicating with other service systems such as security, access control, lifts and parking;

● sustainable management in terms of the use of energy, water and the disposal of pollution and waste.

Many studies have been developed to demonstrate the benefits of pervasive intelligent spaces in both academia and industry.

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The potential of pervasive informatics to advance social interaction has already been recognized by industry with several major academic institutions receiving significant funding to embark on serious research activities. In the US, a new Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University opened in July 2009. Funded by Lilly Endowment Inc at a cost of $15 million over five years, the new institute endeavours to push forward research activities in the field.3 Elsewhere in the US, the University of Florida’s Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory has been developing programmable pervasive spaces with which smart homes can be instantly generated and installed ‘off-the-shelf’. A sensor network can communicate with a wide variety of devices, appliances and sensors. The service supply and discovery protocols use both service definitions and semantics to register or discover a service. Many examples of services provided in an intelligent or smart space can be found. For example, a smart mailbox can notify the occupant when mail arrives via sensors in the mailbox; smart windows have automated blinds that can adjust opening angles through a light sensor to control ambient light and provide privacy spaces; the smart bathroom includes a toilet paper sensor, a flush detector and a shower that can adjust water temperature and prevents scalding (Helal, 2005; Helal et al., 2005). Furthermore, there are smart bathrooms that can measure occupant biometrics such as body weight and temperature.

To date, the development of intelligent building technologies has been driven mostly by technology and system availability rather than occupants’ needs and goals (Christiansson, 2007). Consequently, there has often been a gap between client requirements and the resulting service provision. Academic work has been conducted in this area to address the issue. For example, a recent Danish research project (DDB, 2006) enables public clients to put their requirements for final intelligent building service provision onto a virtual model for use by service developers. Such advances indicate how occupants’ requirements for intelligent

and pervasive application success need to be captured and utilized in the design of intelligent spaces in smart homes, workplaces, schools and hospitals. However, more challenging issues lie in socio-economic, cultural and environmental aspects. How to strive for a balance between all those issues and satisfy the users’ requirement will be a particular challenge.

RELEVANT THEORIES AND TECHNIQUES TOWARDS PERVASIVE INFORMATICSThe key characteristics of intelligent pervasive spaces may lead us to consider more socially oriented concepts as part of a framework to study and understand them. Centrally, we need to consider a range of interactions: between people (both face-to-face and mediated through artefacts such as IT), between people and physical spaces (possibly mediated through pervasive and ubiquitous monitoring technologies), and between physical spaces and technological artefacts (the intelligence of the space). All of these require the production of, interpretation of and acting upon, various sorts of information by humans and technologies. To understand these interactions, consideration and appreciation of social interaction is required, as is an understanding of what information is being created and exchanged. Even interactions solely between technological artefacts – for instance, the automated intelligence of the space – are oriented to responding to social input. But in each case, the interaction within the space is not solely social; even face-to-face interaction is affected by the physical space in which it takes place. Therefore, we look towards theories that allow us to combine social and technological interactions, and consider interaction as socio-technical in nature.

SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEM THEORIESSocio-technical systems (STS) theories have a long history and many variations4 but, from the initial work of the Tavistock Institute in the 1950s, have in common a rejection of purely technological modes of explanation. Trist and Bamforth’s (1951)

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seminal article is a comprehensive critique of new coal-mining methods that were derived from considering technical efficiency but neglected the social transformation of work they implied. Following this tradition, other scholars have looked at the socio-technical nature of systems, notably Thomas Hughes in his study of the initiation and development of electrification systems (Hughes, 1983). He used the term ‘seamless web’ to describe how in the US a heterogeneous assemblage of artefacts (such as transformers, generators and light-bulbs), institutions (such as government, research and development organizations and legal practices) and resources (new scientific information, patents and financial capital) were produced and put together with the inventor entrepreneur Thomas Edison at its centre. Both of these approaches describe the interdependence and inseparability of social and technical actors and artefacts, and Hughes offered the notion of the heterogeneous network as both the vehicle and the product of complex systems. Importantly, it also captures the dynamics of networks. Edison’s large technical system did not stand still, but was constantly transforming, incorporating new nodes, whether actors, institutions or technologies, and responding (as well as actively shaping) the external environment. The intelligent pervasive space could be seen as such a network of physical artefacts, information, technology and occupants.

A more radical set of ideas has emerged from actor-network theory (ANT). ANT initially developed from ethnographic studies of laboratory practices and scientific knowledge production (e.g., Latour and Wooolgar, 1979). Rather than observing a purely scientific and objective process of inquiry, these studies revealed scientific practices as highly social, political and above all messy. In addition, it wasn’t just the human actors who were involved in the process of producing knowledge, but the material artefacts, including the laboratory equipment and the phenomena under scientific scrutiny. This has led ANT to critique mainstream sociology and its treatment of the social as distinct from the psychological and the material or natural. Instead, ANT offers the principle of symmetry, where human and non-human entities

are methodologically treated as the same. The centre of this account is the actor-network itself, comprised of a dynamic assemblage of different entities – people, artefacts and information. It is through these networks that practices, for instance, the automated control of indoor climate or the use of information technology, are performed.

But this does present a problem, in terms of how to methodologically interrogate non-human actors. This leads us to the notion of the ‘machine as text’ – an idea that strongly connects STS and the semiotics discussed later. Let us consider the development of an artefact – Woolgar’s (1991) exemplar discussion used a computer, but we can take a building as the example here. This building is designed by humans – architects and engineers – and perhaps computers and other artefacts. But the shape, function and operation of the building are incorporated into the design, by the designers. There may be quite extensive consultation with users, and certainly a briefing process with the client financing the building and, as such, some specific functions or features, both aesthetic and more practical, may be designed into the building. Once it has been built, the designers are no longer present, but the decisions they made and the design they produced are. Effectively, the designers have produced a script within the building. The building can be seen as a text produced by the designers, which the users ‘read’ as they occupy and use the space. The script may enable some sorts of users’ practices, such as controlling temperature through a thermostat, but constrain others, for instance through having non-opening windows. The script may even be open for rewriting, for instance partition walls may be moved to change the layout. Another way of expressing this is through the concept of affordances; the building affords certain actions and prohibits others.

It follows that the more aligned to specific intentions the script of an artefact is, the better it is able to satisfy those intentions. So the more that is known at the design and development stages about eventual use, the better designed the artefact may be. Things are not quite that

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simple, for instance even exhaustive user engagement cannot predict what activities may be desirous in 20 years’ time and often choices can have unanticipated consequences (for instance the almost ubiquitous installation of air conditioning is now having significant consequences for environmental impact). But broadly, the textual metaphor is a useful way to consider the effects non-human entities can have on actor-networks.

By adopting some of the concepts of socio-technical systems approaches, we have some techniques to dynamically investigate and map the complex networks that may constitute an intelligent pervasive space and its occupiers. Neither the technological nor the social is given primacy of explanation; rather we look for the constitution of intelligent spaces from the heterogeneous components that are assembled within the network. We can trace the circulation of information between people and with technologies. It also provides a way to think about socio-technical interactions through a textual metaphor, and seeing the space as a text allows us to think about how the way it is written may be changed to provide more flexible, adaptable or intelligent spaces.

DISTRIBUTED COGNITIONIn distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995a, 1995b), interactions among people that take place in an environment are analysed based on trajectories of information, often captured as representational transformations. This is what is often referred to as ‘observable cognition’, based on the theory that an environment in which people interact to respond to the external stimulus can be treated as a cognitive system. Examples of analyses include ships, aircraft cockpits, call centres, operation centres and air traffic control rooms. Distributed cognition analyses provide explication of how information gets passed and processed, through not only people’s mental representations but also representations captured by artefacts that serve mediatory functions, such as external memories. Although distributed cognition does not necessarily take place in co-located

spaces – rather in functional dependencies of the elements that are involved – it focuses on the emergent phenomena of social interactions among people as well as their interactions with their environment (Hollan et al., 2000). As such, distributed cognition counts as one of the theoretical frameworks and methods of analysis to study pervasive spaces.

CSCW APPROACHESSeamless interactions with the space surrounding human actors and how they affect the coordination mechanisms and the notion of ‘spaces’ have also been studied in the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Among a number of concepts and ideas that emerged over the years in CSCW in relation to the effects of spaces in cooperative work, the concept of ‘media spaces’ and the study of ‘awareness’ are of significance to pervasive informatics.

Media spaces emerged during the mid 1980s as office-to-office, persistent, real-time audio-visual connections between remote locations (Bly et al., 1993; Harrison, 2009). Gaver (1992) describes media space as ‘computer-controllable networks of audio and video equipment used to support synchronous collaboration’ (p17), characterizing media spaces in terms of technology. However, the focus of study naturally developed to include the nature of ‘space’ that media spaces are creating. Gibson’s affordances, which were originally attributed to physical spaces, were analysed in the context of spaces created by media spaces, thereby critically analysing the concept of space as a metaphor (Gaver, 1992). Harrison and Dourish (1996) argued that the metaphor of space, which has been dominant in the design of collaborative systems including media spaces, does not adequately capture the social settings such as mutually held cultural beliefs and shared understandings. Instead they suggested that ‘place’ is a more suitable metaphor to be used for the environment (including ‘spaces’) where interactions take place. A similar observation has also been offered by Fitzpatrick et al. (1996) who distinguished between the ‘places’ or ‘locales’ that are not necessarily spatially constrained but

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reflect the social worlds in which collective tasks take place, and means and artefacts that are often grounded in space. Such a distinction is useful in understanding the complex dependencies between the social and the physical configurations of norms and artefacts in pervasive spaces, and has resonance to the organizational semiotics view discussed later.

The separation of ‘space’ and ‘place’ contributed to the development of ‘place’ metaphor which freed itself from the spatial constraints and enabled researches to focus on meaningful interactions. However, it is noteworthy that partly due to the influence of mobile and ubiquitous computing, the significance of spaces as context of interaction is being re-emphasized (Dourish, 2006). This trajectory leads to the importance of understanding the feature of pervasive spaces.

Among a number of important issues that media spaces research engendered, such as the space and place issue above, is the notion of awareness. Bly et al. (1993) and earlier research in media spaces often referred to awareness in terms of the social context of interactions, such as who is around and what activities are taking place (Dourish and Bly, 1992). Schmidt (2002) pointed out that the term ‘awareness’ carries multiple meanings and is used to capture diverse aspects of ‘being aware of’ something, among which are the ‘practices through which actors tacitly and seamlessly align and integrate their distributed and yet interdependent activities’ (p290). This places cooperative work at the centre of analysis, which makes it useful for the understanding of the effects of awareness in the study of explicit and tacit cooperative work. In the study of pervasive spaces, the affordances of the space and the interactions that take place within it provide an opportunity to further study the notion of awareness, and this in turn would inform the design of pervasive spaces that utilize the positive effects of awareness.

PERVASIVE COMPUTINGIt is tempting to view pervasive informatics as just another flavour of pervasive computing or its predecessor ubiquitous computing. This

distinction between pervasive informatics and pervasive computing is analogous to that between informatics and computing. Whereas informatics focuses on the study of information, the primary concern of computing is the computability or processing of information. As such, pervasive computing tends to be more technology-driven while pervasive informatics tends to be more analytical of the pervasive nature of information. Pervasive or ubiquitous computing is often characterized by concepts such as ‘disappearing computers’ and ‘computers everywhere’. Intelligent pervasive spaces may be enabled by pervasive computing, and pervasive informatics examines the information, in various representations and transformations, that occurs in the pervasive space.

TOWARDS A PERVASIVE INFORMATICS METHODOLOGYThe concepts, theories and techniques reviewed above are examples of the existing body of knowledge that provides the basis for a further development of a methodology for pervasive informatics. While it is still premature to specify a concrete methodology of pervasive informatics, what emerges from the interpretation and problem recognition in pervasive spaces can be characterized as follows:

● Treatment of the assemblage of people, built environment and technology as a unit of analysis with the appreciation of informational properties that emerge from it.

● Recognition of the seamless interaction between the users (occupants) and pervasive spaces and the importance of understanding its nature through the analysis of information passed among them.

● Conceptualization of spaces, technological artefacts and people as components within interconnected socio-technical systems; this avoids the problem of reducing problems, and their solutions to purely ‘technological’ or ‘social’ phenomena.

● Leveraging the socio-technical features of pervasive spaces and the use and management

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of information to ensure positive social effects through the alignment of technology with users’ (occupants’) needs, intentions and well-being.

● Evaluation of the social effects of pervasive spaces through socio-technical analyses. Pervasive spaces for working and living, as socio-technical systems, are dynamic and following the effects of particular interventions (reconfiguring space, implementing new technologies and changing users). Pervasive informatics will offer a longitudinal approach for in-depth and comprehensive studies on these spaces.

What runs through these characteristics are the understanding of the role of information in the interaction between spaces and their occupants, and the socio-technical effects co-created by this assemblage. For this, another perspective can be introduced, namely that of semiotics.

A SEMIOTIC PERSPECTIVE OF INTELLIGENT PERVASIVE SPACESSEMIOTICS OF A BUILT SPACEA built environment such as a home or an office building must first meet physical and economic needs, while also providing functional and informational services. Human users will be able to interact with the built environment through physical devices and other information media, such as visual, acoustic and perceptive interactions. Semiotics, the discipline of signs and human communication, provides a sound theoretical foundation for our understanding of the nature and characteristics of the sign-based interactions.

The word ‘semiotics’ is originated from the Greek word for ‘symptom’, from the ancient study of medical signs. Semiotics later on becomes a mode of knowledge of understanding the world as a system of social and natural entities and relations whose basic unit is the ‘sign’. A sign is anything that stands for something else (e.g., any signal, sound, natural object or artefact). Semiotics as a formal doctrine of signs can be traced back from the two major traditions: the American school of semiotics, attributed mainly to the work of Charles Sanders

Peirce (1839–1914), and the European school of semiology, represented by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who independently investigated the relation between knowledge and signs (Gottdiener, 1995) and developed the basis for the modern study of semiotics, the ‘doctrine of signs’, to look into the ‘life of sign in society’.

Organizational semiotics (Liu, 2000; Liu et al., 2002; Zhang and Liu, 2009) is a sub-branch of semiotics with a particular emphasis on the functions and use of information in organizational settings. Supported by necessary infrastructure, human beings are able to perform certain actions. Such enabling infrastructure can be multifaceted, including built environments and associated social and cultural capabilities empowered by the spaces. For example, an incumbent in an office, a user of a building and an occupant in a socially defined environment can play certain roles and perform certain actions when they are situated in an appropriate environment. This ability may become unavailable or limited when the actor moves outside the environment. The physical infrastructure can be a building, devices and instruments; while the social infrastructure can be entitlements, recognized status and appointed responsibilities. This phenomenon of the actor-in-the-environment is termed as ‘affordance’ (Stamper, 2001) – an ability that someone has with the support of the appropriate infrastructure.

A building is a complex sign system and its function as a physical and social infrastructure lends to the stakeholders all kinds of ‘affordances’. Organizational semiotics enables us to understand the relationships between the built environment and the stakeholders. Methods and techniques developed from organizational semiotics allow us to examine how the complex signs of a building can be best designed and employed to enhance the experience of the users and to meet the requirements of the stakeholders.

USING SEMIOTICS TO GUIDE THE DESIGNTreating a space as a habitat, i.e., a chunk of space–time to support a delimited set of activities, Andersen and Brynskov (2007) define three types

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of habitat from a semiotic perspective (Figure 1). The physical habitat is made of the physical layout and boundaries with the available physical artefacts. The informational habitat is defined by the signs available (i.e., access and reference area) to participants in the activities through the use of digital and non-digital signs. The pragmatic habitat is composed by the affordances offered by the habitat – the possible actions or behaviour enabled within the time–space. They argue that Peirce’s semiotic triangle serves as a useful reference framework to capture the relationship between the activities and habitat. The space itself and its manufactured representations (e.g., signposts and displays) are signs; the ‘interpretant’ of these signs is the activities associated to the habitat; and the object is the phenomena inside the reference area (i.e., things or events that are relevant to the activities). An appropriate mapping (indicated by the dotted line in Figure 1) between the artefact displayed in the building and its representation understood by the user will provide an effective support to the activities of the user of the space.

Based on the three distinct fields of semiotics, known as syntactics, semantics and pragmatics, Stamper (1973) adds three more aspects: empirics, physical world and social world. Although his work has been widely used in analysing business organization and design information systems, its relevance can be clearly

seen in the development of intelligent pervasive spaces (Figure 2).

The analysis below shows relevant issues that have to be addressed in the design of an intelligent pervasive space:

● At the physical level, the material used must serve the requirements, e.g., functionality, durability, protection and insulation. They must have the correct physical properties.

● At the empiric level, the construction must meet certain physical and mechanical standards (e.g., capacity, resistance to weight, pressure and quack, and emergency measures).

● At the syntactic level, there are requirements on the topology, layout, frontage, and interior and exterior decoration.

● From a semantic point of view, the space configuration, layout, frontage and decoration affect on the usability must make sense to the user and satisfy the user’s requirements. The space provides an environment for the user to have appropriate ‘affordances’. The users and the space will establish a mutual dependency. A well-designed space may promote a friendly interaction between the environment and the user; although a complete inverse is also possible.

● At the pragmatic level, each part of the building will transmit silent messages. For example, an elegant appearance of the space may cast an

InterpretantActivities

SignSpace and

representationin access area

ObjectPhenomena in reference area

FIGURE 1 The habitat as a sign in Peircian semiotics (after Andersen and Brynskov, 2007)

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image of importance of the occupant. Paying attention to the details inside the building and incorporating ornaments appropriate to the intended effects may enhance the business performance.

● The social aspects of a space can be incorporated into a design. It is not difficult to observe the difference between a prison and a hotel: the former attempts to highlight the imbalance in social and legal rights between different occupants of the space, while the latter tries to demonstrate friendliness and hospitality to the customers.

A CASE STUDY IN PERVASIVE INFORMATICS: AGENT-BASED INTELLIGENT BUILDING CONTROLSeveral projects in pervasive informatics have been conducted in the Informatics Research Centre and other schools in the University of Reading. The Co-ordinated Management of Intelligent Pervasive Spaces (CMIPS)5 is one of them conducted with industry. CMIPS has several key objectives: automated assessment of building environments in real-time, automated personalization of the workplace environment, and readily deployable sensors by use of wireless networking technology (Yong et al., 2007). One of the key components of the research is to deliver a multi-agent system for building control. The MASBO (multi-agent system for building control) (Qiao et al., 2007) is designed using organizational semiotic methods to address two

major issues in intelligent pervasive spaces. One is to balance energy use and occupants’ preference, which is deemed to be one of the most important features of an intelligent building. The other issue is to learn and predict user’s behaviour, which is crucial for adapting building control according to requirements from a specific user in a space or during an activity. Rather than developing a predefined model, MASBO provides a set of software agents that relies on sensory information from wireless sensors to determine the needs of the user. The decision making is based on norms that reflect the patterns of group and individual behaviour. Figure 3 shows how MASBO, mainly featured by the four agents in the box, works with a building management system (BMS) and other devices to enhance the building performance.

In MASBO, the central agent communicates with the BMS and is responsible for the whole building, while each local agent is to control a zone or a defined space, subject to the policies set for each zone and to the coordination of the central agent. The monitor and control agent communicates with sensory and other service devices. Finally, each personal agent looks after an individual user’s profile and preferences to assist the personalized control of a space. The building assessment (which is outside the scope of this article) is a component in CMIPS to conduct a continuous assessment of building performance for adjustment of policies.

Obligations, commitments, norms of conduct

Media, tokens and signals

Channel capacity, transmission of signals

Structure, language, data and records

Meanings, validity of propositions

Interactions, negotiations, intentions

Social effect

Material

Protocols

Message formats

Content

Interaction

Social effect

Physical

Empiric

Syntactic

Sematic

Pragmatic

FIGURE 2 Applying the semiotic framework in studying buildings (based on Stamper [1973])

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The mechanism of knowledge representation and reasoning in the agent adopts the EDA (epistemic-deontic-axiolgic) architecture (Figure 4) which is rooted in organizational semiotics (Filipe and Liu, 2000; Stamper et al., 2000). The perceptual interface receives input from the wireless sensor network, other devices or other agents. The epistemic component contains knowledge of the domain

(buildings or spaces) and updates its beliefs of the state of the affairs in the domain through the information received by the perceptive interface. The axiological component holds the norms, typically rules related to business, cultural and personal practice, to enable an evaluation of the current state of the domain using the norms. The deontic component performs the evaluation and generates commands for actuation through

BMSPolicy

Management

Central Agent

Monitor & ControlAgent

Local Agent

Personal Agent

UserWireless SensorNetwork

AssessmentSo

ftwar

e Ag

ents

FIGURE 3 MASBO for intelligent building control (adapted from Yong et al., 2007)

Perceptive Interface

Deontic(evaluation and control)

Axiological(norms/business rules)

Epistemic(knowledge and beliefs)

Input from WSN and other devices

Control signals (to BMS and other devices)

FIGURE 4 The EDA agent architecture (adapted from Duangsuwan and Liu [in press])

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other devices or other agents, and for sending control signals to the BMS.

MASBO has been fully embedded into CMIPS. Having realized the critical importance of the balance of the total energy consumption and occupants’ well-being, MASBO has helped the CMIPS to address the current limitations in building management and enabled the building manager, occupants and other stakeholders to achieve such targets. Meanwhile, the different types of agents, such as local and personal agents, allow the personalization of the controls over the zones and spaces for working and living.

By assigning an agent to each individual in the space, a user starts to interact with the space and the building as soon as he is in the range of communication. The interplay between the user and the space through communication using signs is pervasive. The capability of the user is extensively enhanced by the space, i.e., the user will have more ‘affordances’ with the support of such intelligent pervasive space than ever before.

The approach taken in CMIPS exhibited characteristics of pervasive informatics in the following way: it provided a stakeholder analysis in relation to the built environment, requirements of which were captured in the design of the multi-agent system; the use of multi-agent system enabled the treatment of emergent properties generated through the interaction between the space and the occupants; and provided the services that made use of such interactions. At the same time, it had a limited understanding of the socio-technical nature of the space and was not thoroughly evaluated from this perspective. Recent development of semiotic methods for designing intelligent systems (e.g., Gudwin and Queiroz, 2006) should have been more fully exploited. With the pervasive informatics approach, it is expected that the role of information in such pervasive spaces can be revealed for improved future design of services and spaces.

CONCLUSION, TRENDS AND FUTURE RESEARCHPervasive informatics as a concept is a new way of shifting attention in the study of information in

the built environment from a technology-centred view of pervasive computing to socio-technical approaches, to create a new focus of attention in the interaction between the built environment and its occupants. It also responds to the increasing variety, opportunity and complexity of ICT that pervades the built environment. While this does not involve a Kuhnian paradigm shift, it would enable research efforts to converge in this focus of attention that hitherto has been spread among a variety of disciplines. As such, pervasive informatics can consolidate the research efforts in this domain under one label, which is expected to contribute to a better understanding of this complex domain.

Some research issues have been identified for future research in pervasive informatics:

● ‘Understanding the impacts of intelligent pervasive spaces and enabling technologies on occupants’ (Moran and Nakata, 2009). Ubiquitous monitoring of occupants may lead to behaviours of occupants that do not reflect the design intentions. Further research is needed to better understand the impact of ubiquitous monitoring on human behaviour.

● ‘Designing organizations as pervasive information systems – the role of information and artefacts in communication and interaction.’ Co-design of pervasive systems and built environments based on organizational semiotic treatment of organizations as information systems.

● ‘Context-dependent information and knowledge management’, towards effective decision support in pervasive spaces. The built environment provides spaces with informational artefacts as well as physical affordances, which defines a geophysical and social context. Decision making in such a context may impose additional challenges.

● ‘Service-oriented design of intelligent buildings’ as adaptive and learning information spaces with regards to norms and emerging practices in intelligent pervasive spaces.

● ‘Through-life intelligent support in building management’, with a better understanding

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of the lifecycle of pervasive spaces from the conception, design, implementation and utilization through to recycling, to achieve building performance and sustainability.

The list, of course, is not exhaustive, but they all address the issues that lie on the boundaries between the physical, informational and social – capturing the essence of pervasive spaces. From our work, it is clear that pervasive informatics is an interdisciplinary study that will require academics from many fields working closely with industry to bring value to the society.

NOTES1 This is the definition that has been defined and used by Informatics

Research Centre at the University of Reading.

2 Source: The Oxford Encyclopaedic English Dictionary.

3 http://www.pervasivetechnologylabs.iu.edu/, accessed 22/8/2009.

4 The following paragraphs are not intended to provide a

comprehensive overview of this area.

5 www.cmips.org.uk.

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