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ABSTRACT Home Radio addresses the need expressed by families to stay in touch with their home, extending the home experience beyond the boundaries of the physical house: family members can tune in to Home Radio, from anywhere, to see, hear, and interact with home events, activities and information. The current presentation and interaction concept for Home Radio is based on the idea that home activities can be coded by the corresponding utility streams they generate (gas, electricity, water, communication and information). This coded information is broadcast and family members can tune in to this stream. At the receiver's site (e.g. one's office) the coded information is rendered and presented by audio-visual means. User-system interaction is modelled with three different states. In the first state, sound and light and create a pleasant ambience and are unobtrusively present in the environment as people will become familiar with certain audio-video patterns over time. Deviations from these familiar patterns will attract people's attention and cause a transition to the second state in which the user is consciously aware of the audio-visual presentation and focuses on one element, or a combination of elements representing a certain activity. In the third state of interaction the user explicitly interacts with the system, by means of speech and gestures, to acquire the maximum level of information that is available. An informal appraisal of the concept involving a small number of user interface experts showed that the current Home Radio demonstrator complies to a large extent with the requirements that were extracted from our family studies. In this paper we discuss the two design iteration cycles that led to the current Home Radio demonstrator.

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