In the fields of accessibility and childcare, responsive environments refer to settings that allow the child or disabled person to gain a sense of influence over their surroundings. The idea behind these settings is that they are meant to motivate the person to learn and — more importantly — interact with the environment. Bringing this definition over to general user experience design, a responsive environment also serves a similar purpose of motivating the end-user to interact with the environment by giving that user a sense of influence. Through intuitive cues placed by the environment, the user would ideally be able to navigate the environment and slowly learn its rules and quirks over the course of this navigation.
Given that machine learning and AI has progressed so much within the past few years, the logical next step would be to implement some form of learning into responsive environments. As a small-scale example, a responsive drawing program might learn which tools the user picks the most and rearrange the toolbar accordingly or suggest tools to use at certain times. From my perspective, giving responsive environments the ability to learn makes those environments more responsive in turn. After all, if a responsive environment is meant to motivate a user to interact with that environment through intuitive cues, then a learning responsive environment would (hopefully) enhance the intuitive nature of those cues. This would then further motivate user interactions; the idea of a learning responsive environment would open many opportunities for designers to enhance their created environments for users.