A new approach to design and evaluate ambient systems for instrumented environments

In this paper we raise the question whether we can measure the ambience of a system that is integrated in an existing environment. This paper describes a new approach for designing and developing ambient systems. Other than the traditional software development concepts, we concentrate on the challenges of ambient designs. First, we give a motivation why it would be interesting to measure ambience followed by some ideas how it could look like. By trying to find a formula to rate the "level of ambience", we identify a few factors that seem to be important for ambient systems. We think that having such a formula would be of great help for developing, designing and comparing different concepts of systems. In the second part, we introduce the ambience design cycle which consists of four designing stages that could assist designers in the developing process. Both parts should be seen as food for thought of how to design ambient systems.