Author Keywords Ambient Intelligence, Human-Environment-Interaction,

mixed-initiative, interaction synchronization, conflict man-agement metaphors This paper describes an approach for accessing Ambient In-telligence Environments (AmI-E) based on mixed-initiative interaction. Our approach combines mobile interaction ap-pliances with situation-aware interaction. By doing so, we address some major challenges of Human-Environment-Interaction such as loss of user control, missing system image or over-automation. Significant contributions are mechanisms and metaphors for interaction management which avoid and solve conflicts between the user initiated interaction and the actions performed by the adaptive en-vironment. Especially, we describe a generic interaction model and an architecture for mixed-initiative environment control. Within this paper we first analyze the challenges of exist-ing interaction approaches and argue for a mixed-initiative approach to overcome identified challenges. We provide a novel interaction model and describe a prototype realizing this approach. Ambient Interaction and Motivation for a Mixed-Initiative Approac