The objectives of the ACCORD project can be described as through an understanding of the domestic environment create a toolbox that allows future inhabitants of these environments to administer and reconfigure services embedded into future homes.
The consortium behind the project has been made up of one university and two independent industrial research institutes. University of Nottingham have provided the project with expertise in studies of domestic settings as well as technological expertise in distributed systems. SICS � Swedish Institute of Computer Science AB has worked closely together with University of Nottingham regarding the core infrastructure of the resulting Tangible Toolbox. Furthermore SICS has been the leading partner in developing the different exemplar embedded services. Acreo AB has brought their unique knowledge of paper technology to the project to drive and develop the project vision of enable future home inhabitants to be able to print their own tangible interface and through these configure their interactive environment.
During the first year much effort was put behind analysing and understanding the domestic environment, both existing and what future ones might look like. Through ethnographic studies of existing homes we established a good knowledge of current activities within existing homes. Through studies of technology we achieved a glimpse on future domestic services. Based on this knowledge we created a conceptual model of how services can be created through a combination of components. Each component is called a transformer since it takes some input and generates an output based on that input. Also during the first year several possible use of paper technology were investigated and a working prototype using a paper user interface were developed.
With this knowledge the project carried on into the second year of the project during which the Tangible Toolbox was implemented. This included a large number of different example components that combined in different manners make up services. To achieve these combinations four different editors where implemented addressing different kind of use and user groups. The project also created a paper-based version of one of the configuration tools in the Tangible Toolbox based one paper embedded identification technology. At the end of the second year the project was granted an extension period of six months.
During the extension of the project the main effort was to study the Tangible Toolbox in use in a domestic setting. This included evaluating the conceptual model of the Toolbox as well as the configuration tools. Furthermore, an important goal has been to prepare the developed software and its documentation for public release to enable extended use of the Tangible Toolbox.
The results from the project have been disseminated to external sources at a number of occasions. The project has participated at academic conferences and journals. Papers have been presented at conferences such as CHI, CSCW, DIS, UbiComp and UIST. A journal paper has been published in the International Journal on Universal Access in the Information Society. Further more the project have organized and participated in a number of workshops both within the Disappearing Computer (DC) community as well as externally. The specifically built apartment at SICS where the Tangible Toolbox has been installed has been demonstrated during the two last years of the project.
The project has had close collaboration with a number of other DC projects, such as InterLiving, SoundingObject (SoB), Shape, Mime, Smart-Its, Paper++ and SuperInks. The project also took the role to organize the second DC jamboree in conjunction with the UbiComp 2002 conference, a much-appreciated event.