The workplace of the future will support the user to cope with a flexible change of multiple processes and tasks. The actual work context is observed by the system and this will be utilized to support the user with relevant information as well as recommendations to proceed in his work. Interaction channels and presentation means are chosen adaptively; needed knowledge and information is provided pro-actively and in direct context of the work performed. The user will have tightly integrated direct access to different services by mesh up techniques. He will collaborate via informal social networks provided by various Web 2.0 services (e.g., forums, weblogs, wikis, and Xing). Domain experts will be identified automatically through an expert finder which is driven by social mining and advanced machine learning technologies. The user will be able to change the system by the use of end-user development facilities to adapt his working environment to his actual needs and specific environments. These methodologies and technologies have been investigated in a varying depth in the research community. However, only a proper combination will lead to the desired user experience. Knowing about the (business) processes the user is involved in supports this and will form the workplace of the future significantly. Business processes are not necessarily IT-based or IT-supported.

A growing amount of tasks are expected to be delegated to software agents by human users. Such agents carry personal data of the user and act on his behalf. If mobile software agents leave the users' host, the users are left with an uncomfortable lack of knowledge about and control over "what's going on". The authors believe that an important remedy for this lies in sophisticated visualization of the activities and status of software agents. The paper describes the use of Comic Actors for the visualization of software agents and their activities. A virtual advertising agency is used as an example.

The multimedia rapture has held out hopes for advancements in user-centric computing.At the same time, however, there is a move towards autonomous software (cf.intelligent filters, mobile and distributed agents, etc.), leaving users with an uncomfortable lack of knowledge about and control over 'what these components are doing behind their backs'.Visualization of both autonomous agent action and user-agent interaction becomes a crucial issue if these conflicting trends are to be harmonized.We present a system service for comic actor animation, which can be used as a representation of agents of all kinds.A second use case is for rapid authoring of animations which augment multimedia presentations or off-the-shelf software.Our focus is on the reuse of the necessary artwork, using a modular and flexible building-block approach.As a preliminary step, this approach requires a set of elementary animation sequences to be created by a professional graphic artist, once per character.These sequences can be repeatedly combined in custom animated cartoons by easy-to-use commands at runtime.Our Comic Actor Editor Engine CAeditEngine uses a sophisticated approach for combining the elementary building blocks to form complete animations.Our Comic Actor Playing Engine CAplayEngine uses a digital chroma keying technique in combination with layering to display the animations on top of any graphical user interface and any interactive software.The system runs under MS Windows NT, a first version was used in a public interactive exhibit of multimedia and animation techniques and showed excellent performance.