Marius Hartmann

Staying on top of mental models whilst context engineering

The irony cuts deep. The very tools designed to amplify developer productivity can paradoxically erode our understanding of what we're building. This isn't a technical failure—it's a cognitive one. When generation happens faster than comprehension, context slips away. What remains is working software with an increasingly opaque rationale.

Ambient intelligence and the digital umbrella

Even the most modern of cities today seem left in another time in which communication was shaped by the anonymity of its inhabitants. The city as a communication device is antiquated and struggling with how to interact with or even advocate the benefits of presence to its users.

The situated citizen

A successful city plan acknowledges that a city is formed by its inhabitants and users. The narrow winding streets of pre-industrial architecture were not planned per se, but rather formed by the flow of pedestrians and small carts; the flowing waters of daily life carved out the necessary urban pathways.

Interfacing ambient intelligence

Mobile computing and positioning technology merge physical and virtual reality. This hybrid space requires us to look beyond conventional interface designs in search of new forms of interaction that will work in open-ended systems.

In contrast to the safety of the virtual desktop, physical reality is open-ended. Challenges to the design of an interface that must function in a constantly changing world involve practical issues and defining new conceptual models of interaction. The practical, low resolution on visual displays with animation may be a viable solution to changing resolution, distortions, and scattered user attention.

The conceptual approach taken is to avoid unnecessary encodings in the interface and instead build on causal relations between the interface and the immediate environment whenever possible.

The chief contribution of this thesis is the articulation of a visual format that is sufficiently robust, sufficiently swift, and sufficiently flexible to survive in dynamic environments. This approach is contrasted to traditional visual representations of agents and system functions.