Hi!
I'm a maker, and I work with Raspberry Pi computers a lot. I use them to approach my problems, such as necessity for portable computers, home automation and media consumption. However, while solving problems, you might encounter smaller problems that lay within Raspberry Pi computers themselves - that's why there are all kinds of shields and software for our Raspberry Pi!
My inspiration was the fact that existing ways to control/interface with our Raspberry Pi projects aren't comfortable to use and seem to be overly complicated. I don't like using another computer when I just need to shutdown my Pi, or even use a UART adapter to connect it to a wireless network. Instead, I've decided to make an interface that I could use for those things. Once I started working on it, I've understood that it could be used in many more applications - and by many more makers! Thus, the pyLCI project (at that time, WCS) was born. It was also due to the project I'm taking part in for the SciFi Your Pi challenge - the PipBoy wearable assistant project. Thanks to the hardware provided by Element14, I was able to push the project forward. Good news for all PiFace Control and Display shield owners - it's supported by pyLCI among some other shields and installation is very streamlined!
The idea is simple - take your Pi, attach a HD44780 character display (very popular in starter kits, about 3$), attach some buttons, then install & configure the system and it works! It has many modules (I call them "applications") for doing different tasks, including wireless connection management, shutdown&reboot capability, controlling your Linux services, music players and volume, executing scripts etc. It can do much more, however, because it's easily expandable by adding new applications for it . It also has a concept of "device drivers", meaning that you could use different ways to connect a display and buttons - such as GPIO, I2C expanders, or, for example, use a USB keyboard/numpad as an input device!
Since I've started using this system on all my devices, my Raspberry Pi workflow has became drastically better and I've got many more ways to interface my Pi projects because of it.
So - I've polished it, made install scripts so that it can be installed without any weird command-line things, made documentation for it and now other people can use it, too! I'm offering it to all people that'd be interested in using my system and writing applications for solving their problems. I'm also looking for feedback so that I can make it more suitable for solving all kinds of problems we have.
Looking for more information? I have a Hackaday.io project page, here's the hardware guide and here is the documentation I'm keeping up-to-date.