Designing for the invisible: user-centered design of infrastructure awareness systems

Infrastructure awareness systems reveal invisible aspects of infrastructures to their existing or potential users. Designing such systems is challenging as it requires making visible the hidden activity of infrastructures while providing information of interest to the users. To address this challenge we introduce the AMC technique (for Awareness Model Cards). This technique relies conceptually on awareness model's concepts of nimbus and focus. The main objective is to match the users' interests to the information the infrastructure awareness systems can provide, through the use of card matching. This technique provides three benefits: 1) evaluate how relevant is the information displayed by infrastructure awareness systems; 2) identify which of users' interests infrastructure awareness systems do not take into account; 3) identify elements of re-design in the infrastructures themselves, so to improve their adoption.