Personal Information Ecosystems: Design Concerns for Net-Enabled Devices

Today, with the proliferation of affordable computing, people use multiple devices to fulfill their information needs. Designers approach each device platform individually, without accounting for the other devices that users may also use. In many cases, the software applications on all the user's devices are designed to be functional replicates of each other, often with an emphasis on keeping their form and function consistent with the same application on other device platforms. In this paper, we present the idea of a personal information ecosystem, an analogy to biological ecosystems, which allows us to discuss the inter-relationships among users' devices. Using the examples of now-ubiquitous web-enabled devices, we discuss how considering the user's ecosystem of devices as a holistic design target gives designers and researchers a language to describe and discuss the design of applications that span multiple devices.