Designing the social Internet of Things

Copyright © 2017 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM). What role do people have in the Internet of Things? Compared to the impressive body of research that is currently tackling the technical issues of the Internet of Things, social aspects of agency, engagement, participation, and ethics, are receiving less attention. The goal of this 'Designing the Social Internet of Things' workshop is to contribute by shedding light on these aspects. We invite prospective participants to take a humanistic standpoint, explore people's relations with 'things' first, and then build on such relations so as to support socially relevant goals of engagement, relatedness, participation, and creativity

Technology individuation: The foibles of augmented everyday objects

This paper presents the concept of technology individuation and explores its role in design. Individuation expresses how, over time, a technology becomes personal and intimate, unique in purpose, orchestrated in place, and how people eventually come to rely on it to sustain connection with others. We articulate this concept as a critical vantage point for designing augmented everyday objects and the Internet of Things. Individuation foregrounds aspects of habituation, routines and arrangements that through everyday practices reveal unique meaning, reflect self-identity and support agency. The concept is illustrated through three long term case studies of technology in use, involving tangible and embodied interaction with devices that afford communication, monitoring, and awareness in the home setting. The cases are analysed using Hornecker and Buur’s Tangible Interaction Framework. We further extend upon this framework to better reveal the role played by personal values, history of use, and arrangements, as they develop over time in the home setting, in shaping tangible and embodied interaction with individuated technologies

Towards an analysis framework of technology habituation by older users

Smart everyday objects could support the wellbeing, independent living and social connectedness of ageing people, but their successful adoption depends upon them fitting with their skills, values and goals. Many technologies fail in this respect. Our work is aimed at designs that engage older people by building on their individual affective attachment to habituated objects and leveraging, from a participatory design perspective, the creative process through which people continuously adapt their homes and tools to their own lifestyle. We contribute a novel analytic framework based on an analysis of related research on appropriation and habituated objects. It identifies steps in appropriation from inspection to performance and habituation. We test this framework with the preliminary testing of an augmented habituated object, a messaging kettle. While only used in one home so far, its daily use has provoked many thoughts, scenarios and projections about use by friends, both practical, utopian and dystopian