Simple smart home sensors, e.g. for temperature or light, increasingly collect seemingly inconspicuous data. Prior work has shown that human sensemaking of such sensor data can reveal domestic activities. Such sensemaking presents an opportunity to empower people to understand the implications of simple smart home sensors. To investigate, we developed and field-tested the Guess the Data method, which enabled people to use and make sense of live data from their homes and to collectively interpret and reflect on anonymized data from the homes in our study. Our findings show how participants reconstruct behavior, both individually and collectively, expose the sensitive personal data of others, and use sensor data as evidence and for lateral surveillance within the household. We discuss the potential of our method as a participatory HCI method for investigating design of the IoT and implications created by doing data work on home sensors.
Drawing analogies between smart cameras and electric lighting, we highlight and extrapolate design trends towards always-on sensing in intimate contexts, and the functional expansion of smart cameras as general-purpose and multi-functional devices. Employing a research through design (RtD) approach, we extrapolate these trends using speculative scenarios, materialize the scenarios by designing and constructing lighting-inspired smart camera fixtures, and self-experiment with these fixtures to introduce and exacerbate privacy and security issues, and inspire creative workarounds and design opportunities for sensor-level regulation. We synthesize our insights by presenting 8 smart camera sensing design qualities for addressing privacy, security, and related social and ethical issues.
The presence of voice activated personal assistants (VAPAs) in people's homes rises each year [31]. Industry efforts are invested in making interactions with VAPAs more personal by leveraging information from messages and calendars, and by accessing user accounts for 3rd party services. However, the use of personal data becomes more complicated in interpersonal spaces, such as people's homes. Should a shared agent access the information of many users? If it does, how should it navigate issues of privacy and control? Designers currently lack guidelines to help them design appropriate agent behaviors. We used Speed Dating to explore inchoate social mores around agent actions within a home, including issues of proactivity, interpersonal conflict, and agent prevarication. Findings offer new insights on how more socially sophisticated agents might sense, make judgements about, and navigate social roles and individuals. We discuss how our findings might impact future research and future agent behaviors.
Smart buildings offer an opportunity for better performance and enhanced experience by contextualising services and interactions to the needs and practices of occupants. Yet, this vision is limited by established approaches to building management, delivered top-down through professional facilities management teams, opening up an interaction-gap between occupants and the spaces they inhabit. To address the challenge of how smart buildings might be more inclusively managed, we present the results of a qualitative study with student occupants of a smart building, with design workshops including building walks and speculative futuring. We develop new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces as they experience them, and of how building management practices might evolve with new sociotechnical systems that better leverage occupant agency. Our findings point to important directions for HCI research in this nascent area, including the need for HBI (Human-Building Interaction) design to challenge entrenched roles in building management.
Recent years have seen an explosion of internet of things (IoT) technologies being released to the market. There has also been an emerging interest in the potentials of IoT devices to support people with chronic health conditions. In this paper, we describe the results of engagements to scope the future potentials of IoT for supporting people with Parkinson's (PwP). We ran a 2-day multi-disciplinary event with professionals with expertise in Parkinson's and IoT, to explore the opportunities, challenges and benefits. We then ran 4 workshops, engaging 13 PwP and caregivers, to scope out the needs, values and desires that the community has for utilizing IoT to monitor their symptoms. This work contributes considerations for future IoT solutions that might support PwP in better understanding their condition, through the provision of objective measurements that correspond to their, currently unmeasured, subjective experiences.