Reactive environments

As information technology becomes increasingly widespread, people are confronted with the burden of controlling a myriad of complex devices in day-to-day activities. Rather than making lives easier, as technology was intended to do, it has complicated the activities with lengthy instruction manuals and confusing user interfaces. Designers have been trying to make the computer more user-friendly ever since its inception. The last two decades have bought us the notable advances of keyboard terminals, graphic displays, and pointing devices, as well as the graphical user interface, introduced in 1981 by Xerox Star and popularized by Apple Macintosh. Despite of the emergence of pen-based and portable computers, the basic rules of interaction between man and machine have not changed. Thus, computer scientists came up with a new approach to human-computer interaction in which computing would not necessitate sitting in front of a screen and isolating from the world around. This concept marks a dramatic shift from the status quo in which interaction with the computer interferes with daily activities rather than enhancing them.