Designing Tools for Reflection: a concept-driven approach

We are surrounded by objects. We often use and interact with them to do our daily activities. They do not only support us and augment our abilities, but also, can be considered as companions of our thoughts. We think with objects, because they contain information about us: about our memories, experiences, emotions, and activities as Sherry Turkle highlights (2011). Furthermore, our everyday objects are increasingly computed, smart and connected to the Internet. They are able to collect data, elaborate and provide real-time feedbacks. These feedbacks cannot only support us to improve our activities, but also enables critical thinking and reflection on our actions. This resonates very well with what Donald Schön meant by having reflective conversation with materials at hand (1983;1996). He highlighted that materials –artifacts– of a situation talk back to designer, so they enable and support reflection in action of designing. So, how about if we consider that our daily objects can talk back and make us think on our actions in order to consider alternatives? This dissertation, is an attempt to consider this opportunity. The nature of this dissertation is mostly conceptual and its scope is defining the physical and behavioral characteristics of smart artifacts able to provoke thoughts and reflection in user leading to a conscious behavior change. I sought to use existing theories about reflective thinking in HCI and beyond, as valuable sources for developing design concept. I have been inspired by the Concept-Driven interaction design research (Stolterman and Wiberg 2011) and created and defined the whole structure of this dissertation based on this methodology, from the definition of the concept – Tool for Reflection – to the construction of a theoretical model from the design outcome –Make Me Think model. During this process, I used different methods such as conducting literature analysis, context analysis, survey, participatory session and prototyping. The sustainable urban mobility behaviors in the city of Turin (Italy) as the target behavior and home as the place for using Tool for Reflection have been chosen for this research. In particular, informed by architectural studies, I conceptualized In-Between Places as a category of places that connect home places to city places. I suggested to consider such areas as suitable places for evoking thoughts on urban mobility behaviors, in home. This dissertation provides a theoretical perspective with which to guide the design of smart objects that evoke reflection. It first provides a set of characteristics of a Tool for Reflection as a physical artifact. Then it provides a theoretical model, considering the relationship between a Tool for Reflection and a user. The key contributions include the design of the Sóle, a smart lamp, not only as an example of a Tool for Reflection with its theoretically pre-defined characteristics, but also as an instrument for iterating from design to the theory. The overall approach, the methodology and the findings should be of interest in particular to researchers working on design for reflection in the HCI. More broadly this dissertation can be of interest of researchers in the HCI, whose research is around designing artifacts, both as an ‘outcome’ and as an ‘instrument’ of the research process

Towards Environmental Inclusion: Fostering inclusive mobility behaviours through Internet of Things

This poster describes our project about design for sustainable mobility behaviour, facilitated by the Internet of Things. In particular we have based our research on Schultz's integrated cognitive representation of self and other that confirms sustainable behaviours are the consequences of the ecological thinking. In order to foster ecological thinking in the home environment, we have designed a smart key hook that has three essential connected parts with which users interact: digital interface, touch bottoms and key hooks. The digital interface displays the transformations within the ecosystem based on the data and the related metrics, which are accessed from credible sources and are [near] real-time data. The device offers educational value by presenting the effect of the user's decisions in choosing different modes of transportation

Home delivery services: innovations and emerging needs

The increasing amount of small-sized shipments and their frequency variation, due to the growth of e-commerce, pose a great challenge to logistics service providers. At the same time, new technologies and innovations are being developed with the aim of increasing the efficiency of logistics service provider, as much as foster the creation of new enterprises and business models in the home delivery sector. The aim of this paper is to provide an exploratory analysis of the fit between existing home delivery innovative services, requirements, and issues that users might have. To do so, we review the main features of innovative services and we compare them with the findings from an online survey. For each service, we identify the value propositions, and the issues the service aims to address. In particular, four innovative services are reviewed. Through the online survey, we identify user’s habits, requirements and perceptions regarding the effectiveness and features of the innovative services

Mobile awareness: Design for connectedness

This article describes our ongoing research project about design for behavior change, which is facilitated by Ubiquitous Computing technologies. In particular in this paper we discuss the potentiality of mobile devices to facilitate the mobility behavior change among people who are currently living at Turin, Italy. To this aim we illustrate our conceptual design of a mobile game, which is designed to facilitate mobility behavior change

The Smart Home Services Diffusion Process: A System Dynamics Model

The application of smart technologies for domestic environment has been around for a while. But the market diffusion of such products and services has not seen yet a significant growth. This paper seeks to provide an overview of the most important factors that influence the diffusion process of smart home services via literature and a case study. These factors compose a System Dynamics model showing the diffusion dynamics of three main smart home services (Heating, Monitoring, Assisted Living)

From ”Explainable AI” to ”Graspable AI”

Since the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), researchers have asked how intelligent computing systems could interact with and relate to their users and their surroundings, leading to debates around issues of biased AI systems, ML black-box, user trust, user’s perception of control over the system, and system’s transparency, to name a few. All of these issues are related to how humans interact with AI or ML systems, through an interface which uses different interaction modalities. Prior studies address these issues from a variety of perspectives, spanning from understanding and framing the problems through ethics and Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives to finding effective technical solutions to the problems. But what is shared among almost all those efforts is an assumption that if systems can explain the how and why of their predictions, people will have a better perception of control and therefore will trust such systems more, and even can correct their shortcomings. This research field has been called Explainable AI (XAI). In this studio, we take stock on prior efforts in this area; however, we focus on using Tangible and Embodied Interaction (TEI) as an interaction modality for understanding ML. We note that the affordances of physical forms and their behaviors potentially can not only contribute to the explainability of ML systems, but also can contribute to an open environment for criticism. This studio seeks to both critique explainable ML terminology and to map the opportunities that TEI can offer to the HCI for designing more sustainable, graspable and just intelligent systems.QC 20210526</p

The data hungry home

It's said that the pleasure is in the giving, not the receiving. This belief is validated by how humans interact with their family, friends and society as well as their gardens, homes, and pets. Yet for ubiquitous devices, this dynamic is reversed with devices as the donors and owners as the recipients. This paper explores an alternative paradigm where these devices are elevated, becoming members of Data Hungry Homes, allowing us to build relationships with them using the principles that we apply to family, pets or houseplants. These devices are developed to fit into a new concept of the home, can symbiotically interact with us and possess needs and traits that yield unexpected positive or negative outcomes from interacting with them. Such relationships could enrich our lives through our endeavours to “feed” our Data Hungry Homes, possibly leading us to explore new avenues and interactions outside and inside the home

Progettazione di manufatti connessi per l'ambiente domestico: riflessioni sui processi di progettazione e metodologie

Il crescente utilizzo di tecnologie informatiche e la connettività a Internet hanno portato enormi cambiamenti nel modo in cui le persone vivono, lavorano, si divertono e interagiscono tra loro. Questo fenomeno viene descritto con vari nomi: Ubiquitous Computing, Internet of Things, Connected Homes, Living Services, ecc. Quest'articolo presenta una parte di uno studio più ampio, volto a indagare le prospettive di una nuova metodologia per progettare gli artefatti tecnologici e connessi pensati per l'ambiente domestico. Questi artefatti sono in grado di rilevare le azioni umane con lo scopo di monitoraggio, verifica e rilevazione di pattern di queste azioni, e di fornire una valutazione. L'articolo è diviso in due parti principali, la prima offre una panoramica della letteratura esistente, riguardante la progettazione tecnologica per l'ambiente domestico, al fine di fornire un'analisi dei fattori più importanti per la progettazione tecnologica per la casa, nonché una breve introduzione di due delle metodologie principali del design applicate al contesto tecnologico. La seconda parte, invece, è il risultato di una serie di interviste semi-strutturate, condotte su tre diversi gruppi di persone/professionisti che afferiscono a discipline diverse, tutte in qualche modo coinvolte nel processo della progettazione di artefatti tecnologici per l'ambiente domestico: ingegneri informatici, designer e specialisti di UX (User Experience). Infine, si discuteranno le direzioni di ricerca future (la necessità di sviluppare un nuovo linguaggio di comunicazione tra diverse discipline)

Toward intelligent environments: supporting reflection with smart objects in the home

In our spaces, which are increasingly computational and intelligent, we use objects in our daily activities. Through this article, I seek to build upon existing bodies of knowledge that are well grounded in architecture and HCI. They suggest that we first observe the pattern of people's activities and the objects of use in a space in order to design better and supportive architectural spaces, as well as to design better computing artifacts that can support user activities. In this way, an architectural space becomes smart by supporting natural existing relations within it, such as relations among people, objects, activities, and the space itself. Further, considering these relations when designing smart objects to support reflection about an activity—instead of creating new objects and consequently new usage and interactions—is a valuable way of structuring the analysis of complex spaces. This is well grounded in theories (e.g., distributed cognition) that describe how people think with objects, and that reflection is distributed across people, objects, and spaces. There are three main relations between the architectural space and other components in it: people, activities, and objects. Analyzing those relations becomes even more relevant as we increasingly consider reflection as a goal for design outcomes, especially for the design of smart and interactive artifacts

What design education tells us about design theory : a pedagogical genealogy

In design theory, we often come across scholarly efforts that seek to define design as a unique discipline and to characterize it as a distinct category of practice, with its own epistemology in that it differs from sciences, arts and humanities (Cross, N. 2011. Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work. Oxford: Berg.; Dorst, K. 2015. Frame innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Nelson, H. G., and E. Stolterman. 2012. The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. The MIT Press.; Redström, J. 2017. Making Design Theory. MIT Press.). Although such efforts are helpful in teasing forward the nature of design epistemologies and practices, we question them by critically engaging with epistemic paradigms informing design education, its structural forms, origins and purposes, historically, while suggesting the time has come to reevaluate design’s relationships with other epistemological traditions, including the sciences and humanities. We unpack history of design education, in order to problematize what we have come to view as overly schematized epistemological distinctions, most notably the asserted opposition between (what Schön calls) technical rationality and an alternative epistemology broadly linked to pragmatism and/or phenomenology. We do so by offering a genealogy of design education showing that since the nineteenth century, design programmes have continuously, if diversely, taught novice designers, methods, crafts, and attitudes that reflect diverse epistemological traditions. Theorists and educators of design have a shared interest in balancing the needs to appreciate and help develop that which is distinctive of design and also to build upon design’s rich epistemological connections to the sciences and humanities. Whereas the former helps the field improve its abilities to contribute to society, the latter provides many of the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical resources that make such contributions possible