Department of Creative Design EngineeringAs more people live in the cities, the distance between people and our food source is getting farther and there are many innovative solutions to grow food within city life spaces. According to preliminary interview with 30 people, it was found that the fact is assumable that people care their plants forming an emotional bonding on their plants or activities itself. On the other hand, many existing solutions are tuned in the technological specifications and it is lack of user study on the personal indoor farming type of product.
Along with this context, this project was initiated from a question ???Would the more autonomous system be always better for the users????. As a result, this study aims to answer the following research questions: 1) How does emotional bonding of users differs with regard to the different levels of PIF autonomy? 2) How does the different level of experience in PIF influence emotional bonding of users and products with regard to the different levels of PIF autonomy? 3) What is the direction that PIF should be aiming for in terms of system autonomy and use experience?
Scenario cards were generated based on the ideation workshop with 12 creators who have background in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), Interaction Design, Service Design and UX Design. The 4 level of autonomy and 2 degree of expandability was utilized to structure the 8 set of scenarios from the workshop results. 46 participants are recruited to answer for the survey regarding emotional bonding and the potential determinants under 12 questions. Among 46 participants, 22 people were recruited for experienced group and 23 people were inexperienced group. The one sample was ejected because of low validity. For all questions, people were asked to answer the 12 questions according to 5 Likert scale and choose the best and worst scenario they are willing to use.
Also after survey, people were asked to talk about the reason for choosing the best and worst scenarios. As a result, there was a certain pattern was found that scenarios with level 0 and 2 shows high emotional bonding regardless of expandability. Also, the pattern of emotional bonding score did not show difference on the groups. For the potential determinants of emotional bonding, there was difference between the experienced and the inexperienced and that is: Experienced people more related their memories in the emotional bonding in personal indoor farming. These findings are expected to help the target segmentation for personal indoor farming products and determine the product specifications. Limitations are also discussed at the end with recommendation to a further study.ope
