Dr Ben Shelton

Ambient Information Systems are designed as everyday, peripheral information sources that visualise useful data in a way that can be attended to when possible. Importantly these displays need to be designed to seamlessly fit into their environment and should not interrupt an individual from their primary task. The first Ambient Information System, known as the "Dangling String" was described in the literature in 1996. Since this time a number of different systems have been reported. In this paper we re-examine the concepts, definitions and background to this field that have developed over the last 20 years by performing a detailed narrative review of the field. As a result we provide a detailed discussion on the key design features or dimensions that have been used to help categorise and evaluate such displays. We also examine 36 previously reported Ambient Information Systems and categorise them in terms of an existing taxonomy of design patterns for such systems. A benefit of this taxonomy approach is that it helps us identify an underutilised design area for these displays and leads us to propose a new design pattern, known as the "Aesthetic Awareness Display" to assist in the design of these systems. This type of Ambient Display uses metaphors in order to encode a few data elements into an aesthetically pleasing display with the goal of raising general awareness about the data.