Towards Self-explaining Intelligent Environments

Intelligent environments and assistants increasingly pervade and shape all areas of our daily life. They are characterised by dynamically varying numbers of coexisting, ideally cooperating but at least coordinated assistants and devices and users. This makes it difficult not only for technically inexperienced individual users to understand what is happening around them. It also does not help to know that the overall behaviour is correct in any sense whatsoever. From Human-Computer- Interaction research it is well known that systems providing explanations of their decision can improve the user's trust in the systems. Illustrated by examples from our research on developing smart assistance in intelligent environments we motivate the need for self-explainability capabilities of intelligent environments. We shed a light on different aspects of self-explainability, motivate the need for explanations for the target user groups and provide criteria that are relevant to address for the design of self-explaining intelligent environments.