ICT enables the creation of novel extensions of human senses and interaction capabilities that support fundamental human communication, information and social needs.
As ICT supports more and more communication and information tasks, the relationship between humans and machines becomes closer. This relationship is also becoming more social, although computers still miss the capability of explicitly acting as fully fledged social actors.

Enabling social role-playing requires endowing the computer with the capability of understanding social behaviour, as well as its production. ICT brings communicating parties together in ways that emulate, if not completely replace, physical presence. Such mediated presence will cause the emergence of new social structures that are no longer geographically limited, resulting in new types of markets. Understanding these structures is a necessary step towards introducing new market-driven ICT-solutions.

Both academic and industrial partners within EIT ICT Labs will work together on creating novel technological solutions for fundamental user tasks. Existing technological solutions in the form of research prototypes will be communicated to a wider audience in a number of ways:

By selecting tasks that do fulfil existing needs, users are more likely to be motivated to try out the new technology.
By selecting a domain that is familiar to users, novel technology is more easily understood and more easily drawn into the user’s working environment.
By concentrating effort on the aesthetics of the application interface and the interaction style, users are more likely to accept the technology.
By stimulating collaboration with media artists and interaction designers, more attractive ways of interacting will be developed.