4.6 Conclusion

The design and development phase is essential in creating successful me-centric solutions. While this is true for all product development, it needs to be emphasized that product development, no matter whether it is a software service or an intelligent appliance, needs to focus on the user. The reason why so many computer programs are difficult to use is they have been designed, developed, and tested by programmers. In many cases, even the documentation is written by the programmer, making it even less likely that a typical user 's viewpoint will be addressed effectively.

This means that not only do the designers and developers need to change their way of doing their work, but also the result needs to change dramatically. Technical people need to work with the end users, but also with psychologists and sociologists to create compelling products. Me-centric computing development has moved beyond computer science. Me-centric computing can only be successful if cross-cultural and cross-scientific teams work together on the design and development.

As you can see, me-centric devices need to integrate a variety of flexibilities in design and implementation. This is required to enable these products to work well in diverse cultures and locales and to provide users affordances they find natural. This requires an architectural approach that can help us create and deliver a large number of diverse products from a finite, manageable set of components .

The next chapter introduces the architecture for me-centric component technologies, which are independent of a specific solution and can be used as infrastructure ingredients in all me-centric solutions.