m3i is designed to remove the barriers that exist between office equipment and users. It aims to connect people more effectively with their office tasks; to link machines seamlesly with backend systems and to deliver functionality and content to users in different formats concurrently on multiple devices.

m3i = man machine mobile interconnect

A weighty title that we immediately shorted to m3i so that it was possible for people to say. It does however convey the concept and our aspirations for the platform in as few words as we could manage.

The important word in User Interface is User. User Interfaces are about users not about machines. Take all the machines you see around you. Some feel good to work with, some don't. All of them however make you work in their way, not yours. When we enjoy man-machine interaction we describe the experience as intuitive. What we actually mean is that the machine's UI designer translated the machine's purpose into a form that an average person found to be easily understandable. In short, we just get it! Thats about the most that can be hoped for, considering that the designer is inherently restricted by the machine's screen or its physicality or that Mr Average doesnt happen to exist. Whichever way you look at it, it's almost impossible for UI designers to deliver the perfect UI - the design is ultimately flawed.

We are moving toward a time where man and machine are continuously interconnected. We see the beginnings of this today with powerful mobile devices able to deliver content to us from all corners of the globe. We see machines joining this network at a faster rate than humans. We need a way to reach out and use these machines, to grab their content and direct it as we wish and to do so on our terms and not as envisaged by the machine's creator.

In the future it is unlikely that we will be able to interact directly with machines in our environment; they will be too complex, too fast or too interconnected such that we will cease to understand their functionality in the terms we understand it today. Instead we will have smart devices containing smart agents that will understand our required result and translate it into commands for machines who will carry it out. This, in a very simple way, is what a User Interface does today except that today the UI belongs to the machine rather than the user.

Recognising that a shift such as this is not an easy thing to achieve, there are many steps along the road, we have begun with the office environment which is manifest with these problems and impatient to find cost effective solutions that empower users to achieve. To give our vision the greatest chance, we partnered with Ricoh, the premier world supplier of office solutions to deliver practical solutions today as the first step to the future.

Now the machine designer can relax - the pressure is off and he can stop trying to achieve the impossible. m3i frees the functionality into the network, it's now only a lack of imagination that holds the user back.

If you would like to know a little more detail: m3i Concept.pdf