Supporting domain experts in creating pervasive experiences

Located pervasive experiences are often constructed as one off deployments with domain experts acting in a consultancy role to technical specialists who construct the experience. In this paper we will look at how pervasive infrastructures might be constructed that can support domain experts as direct experience authors. We present a case study based around a locative pervasive system supporting school field trips, and describe how aspects of the construction and running of the experience were handed over to the domain experts. Based on our experiences we suggest a number of key principles that we believe make it possible for nonspecialists to become pervasive authors: separation of the information layer, use of metaphor, in-situ authoring, robustness, varied location modelling and coarse orchestration.