Concepts of multi-artifact systems in artifact ecologies

The artifact ecologies emerging from the increasing number of interactive digital artifacts, capable of communicating with each other, have created a situation where software applications no longer need to be limited by the physical boundaries of a single artifact. In order to take advantage of the full potential of this situation, we first need to establish a common understanding of the interaction that crosses physical artifact boundaries. Eventually, this will help us understand and design multi-artifact systems that are more than the sum of its individual parts. In this paper, we analyze two multi-artifact systems from our prior work within the domain of music consumption and identify four concepts of multi-artifact interaction: Plasticity, migration, complementarity, and multi-user. We discuss the concepts in order to relate them to an artifact ecology thinking and identify implications for future work.