Model-Driven Adaptation for Plastic User Interfaces

User Interface (UI) plasticity denotes UI adaptation to the context of use (user, platform, physical and social environments) while preserving usability. In this article, we focus on the use of Model-Driven Engineering and demonstrate how the intrinsic flexibility of this approach can be exploited by designers for UI prototyping as well as by end-users in real settings. For doing so, the models developed at design-time, which convey high-level design decisions, are still available at run-time. As a result, an interactive system is not limited to a set of linked pieces of code, but is a graph of models that evolves, expresses and maintains multiple perspectives on the system from top-level tasks to the final UI. A simplified version of a Home Heating Control System is used to illustrate our approach and technical implementation.