While there has been rapid growth in smart home research from a technical perspective – focusing on home automation, devices, software, and protocols – few review papers examine the human-centered perspective. A human-centered focus is crucial for achieving the goals of providing natural, convenient, comfortable, friendly, and safe user experiences in the smart home. To understand key innovations in human-centered smart home research, we analyzed keyword changes over time via 19,091 papers from 2000 to 2022, then selected 55 papers from high-impact venues in the last five years, and summarized them through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Our analysis revealed five research trends with unique characteristics and interdependence. Drawing on this review, we elaborate on the future of smart home design research with respect to multidisciplinary development, stakeholder involvement, and the shift of design implications.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580842
Multilingual speakers tend to interleave two or more languages when communicating. This communication strategy is called code-mixing, and it has surged with today’s ever-increasing linguistic and cultural diversity. Because of their communication style, multilinguals who use conversational agents have specific needs and expectations which are currently not being met by conversational systems. While research has been undertaken on code-mixing conversational systems, previous works have rarely focused on the code-mixing users themselves to discover their genuine needs. This work furthers our understanding of the challenges faced by code-mixing users in conversational agent interaction, unveils the key factors that users consider in code-mixing scenarios, and explores expectations that users have for future conversational agents capable of code-mixing. This study discusses the design implications of our findings and provides a guide on how to alleviate the challenges faced by multilingual users and how to improve the conversational agent user experience for multilingual users.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581445
Despite irreversibility being omnipresent in the lifeworld, research on interactions making use of irreversibility in computing systems is still in the early stages. User freedom – provided by the undo functionality – is considered to be a pillar of "usable" computer systems, overcoming irreversibility. Within this paper, we set up a thought experiment, challenging the "undo feature" and instead take advantage of irreversibility in the interaction with physical computing systems (tangibles, robots, etc). First, we present three material speculations, each inherently utilizing irreversibility. Second, we elaborate on the concept of irreversible interactions by contextualizing our work with critical HCI discourses and deducing three design strategies. Finally, we discuss irreversibility as a design element for self-reflection, meaningful acting, and a sustainable relationship with technology. While previously individual aspects of irreversibility have been explored, we contribute a comprehensive discussion of irreversible interactions in HCI presenting artifacts, a conceptualization, design strategies, and application purposes.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581433
The rapid development of touchless systems has introduced many innovations in social interaction scenarios in recent years. People now can interact with touchless systems in social applications that are aimed to be used in everyday situations in the future. This accelerated development makes us ask, what will the next generation of touchless systems be like? How can we responsibly develop new touchless technologies in the future? To answer the first question, we brought together 20 experts to ideate, speculate, and evaluate possible touchless applications for social interactions. A total of 48 ideas were generated from two consecutive workshops. Then, to answer the second question, we critically analyzed those ideas through a thematic analysis using a responsible innovation (RI) framework, and identified key ethical considerations to guide developers, practitioners when designing future touchless systems. We argue that the social scenarios described, and the RI framework proposed in this paper are a useful starting point for responsibly designing the next generation of touchless systems
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581228
Being a little more careful about the sound that people produce is difficult in shared houses because individuals can generate several unintended living noises and sounds. We designed Tunee to help each housemate better understand the others’ context and desired noise-level. It is an interactive speaker that allows people to share noise-level preferences through the position change of nodes. Our three-week in-field study with four groups of participants revealed that expressing noise-level preference through nodes reduced the burden of verbally delivering issues about the trivial noises of everyday life, and the intentions of the lowered preference were referred to and deemed significant. We also identified how participants figured out what behavior was acceptable for others according to each noise-level. Our findings imply considerations in designing interfaces to support coordinating behaviors and awareness of social contexts in shared spaces.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581521
We ask how historic redlining, a US government run, racially discriminatory practice of assessing and mapping property values for federally subsidized home loan eligibility in the 1930s, is tied to current issues of sustainability. We frame redlining as a historic data practice, tied to ongoing exposure to environmental harms and difficulty building generational wealth in African American communities in Indianapolis. To address this, we made maps to ground interdisciplinary discourse between the authors: two who research sustainable human computer interaction (SHCI) and one who researches sustainable food systems, including issues of food security. Our maps, which combine historical redlining maps and contemporary sustainability issues facing Indianapolis, helped us explore the ongoing impacts of redlining across our disciplines. We develop the term ‘sustainability’ for HCI across racial, socioeconomic, and environmental tensions and reflect on how SHCI’s emerging posthuman emphasis on human/non-human relations are associated with human/human challenges like redlining.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581491