Spreading of Excellence

Advanced research on Enactive Interaction and Interfaces can have an important impact on the European scientific research and technological-industrial development. Granting this impact is one of the objectives of the Network. It can be achieved only through the establishment of a co-ordinated diffusion of the research activities and results, tended to the promotion and education to the aspects related to Enaction. For this reason the Network has established the following dissemination objectives:

Creating a Network infrastructure to promote co-ordinated dissemination and exploitation of results.

Assuming that Enaction is one of the main contemporary concept pursuing fruitfully the basic 'Ecology of perception", and that it is able to stimulate new paradigms in Human-Computer Interaction, the ENACTIVE Network aims at setting-up an international community of researchers. The ENACTIVE Network wants to: (1) effectively integrate the necessary critical mass and (2) investigate deeper in the concepts and their implementation in applications, to create a "way of thinking and implementing", supported by epistemological and technological innovations in HCI.

Disseminating and educating to the concepts, knowledge and technologies developed in the Network activities.

All of the ENACTIVE partners are involved in academic courses in computer/engineering sciences or human sciences. The activities of the Network naturally find an output in such teaching. In a few years , it is expected that this training will constitute a new wave of young researchers and designers, which is probably the best way to disseminate and receive this common investment comeback. To sustain this effort, the consortium does not neglect to publish educational media for these students. Thus, these new students could have access and develop expertise in this interdisciplinary field and know simultaneously technological and human aspects of this domain.

Promoting the enactive interaction paradigm in the philosophical, scientific and technological communities and creating a social comprehension of this novel type of systems to accelerate its acceptance and diffusion among users.

The ENACTIVE Network takes care of a wide and adequate diffusion of works in all of the scientific communities addressed by the project. The aim is (1) to clarify and implement a strong cross-dependency between disciplines (for example, technology and humanities), (2) to find the ways of the structuring of this interdependency, (3) to work for an adjustment of knowledge, (4) to stimulate intellectual creativity.

Promoting the commercial and social exploitation of Enactive Interfaces.

Assuming that the activities and concepts proposed have a strong capability of integration but cannot be immediately applied in all their possible outcomes, a strategy in three phases is currently applied :

• Proposition of the implementation of common solutions and possibly new standards in crucial bottlenecks of current needs, such as haptic devices, multisensorial data representation including the flexibility of the haptic modality and associated actions, reactivity in intelligent interfaces, etc.
• In the middle term, by performing analysis in limitations which occurred in other current developments : tasks analysis, human performances, etc… and proposing prototypical technological solutions.
• In a longer term, to propose complete, integrated technological solutions.