Built environments increasingly incorporate new forms of intelligence, creating opportunities for enhancing human interactive experiences with and within building spaces. This scoping review examines design interventions and discourses within the domain of "Smart Buildings". The goal is to identify and characterise the type of human experiences that research in this domain aims to address. Using a hybrid deductive-inductive coding approach, we analysed 192 papers related to human experiences and smart buildings from ACM Digital Library and Scopus published between 1996 and 2024. Our analysis revealed 11 distinct "targeted human experiences", 20 commonly used "design mechanisms" to achieve those design goals, as well as two typologies of "technological interventions". Our findings create a foundation for understanding building design research and the range of human experience they entail.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713903
Smart home technologies embed values such as sustainability, comfort, privacy, and security, which can sometimes conflict with one another, considering the complexities of domestic environments. This paper investigates the potential implications of these value conflicts and the corresponding design challenges. Through an enactment session and co-speculations with professional actors, we explored what it means to navigate multiple values simultaneously, live with products that impose their own values, and manage value conflicts both with and among smart products. The findings challenge the seamless and harmonious vision of smart homes conceived by technologists, proposing shifts in the common narrative: from value alignment to value transparency, from service provision to mutual care, and from autonomy to responsiveness. We discuss that acknowledging value conflicts, rather than eliminating them, is an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of users and home environments and guide the design of smart home technologies.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713138
Smart home technologies are becoming increasingly common in households with children. While privacy and security concerns have been widely discussed, a critical issue often overlooked is the extensive data harvesting embedded in these smart homes and its manipulative impact on children through algorithmic decision-making. In this paper, we introduce FamiData Hub, a speculative prototype designed to empower families to navigate the datafication of smart homes. Through 17 study sessions—including speculative interviews followed by co-design activities—with 30 children and 25 parents, we found that families face challenges related to smart home datafication, such as the erosion of boundaries in family spaces, loss of control over family norms, and diminished autonomy in data-driven decision-making processes. Our findings offer key design recommendations for rethinking smart home technologies to better safeguard children's data, advocating for respectful, family-centered approaches that challenge the normalization of datafication in domestic life.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713494
Home routers serve as a gateway to the Internet and configuration issues such as weak passwords can simply be introduced by users that configured them, potentially leading to severe consequences. The most critical phase in the lifecycle of a home router is perhaps the initial setup intended for users to complete. Yet, the mindset and behavior of users during this process remain under-explored. In a comprehensive online survey of 392 participants across several regions, we find that router settings and user behavior vary significantly between China and English-speaking countries, influenced by factors like IT background, age, gender, and education. A majority of participants go through the configuration of their own routers, but many also admit keeping the default settings and are not actively maintaining their router firmware up-to-date, leaving security vulnerabilities unfixed. We estimate that 91% of participant routers run with default settings, which should push router manufacturers to focus on safe defaults. Moreover, while default passwords are often changed, some participants report coping strategies. With noteworthy differences that we have observed across user backgrounds, we believe that our takeaways can shed some light on advancing the area of home network security.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714231
This study examines how anecdotal stories from friends, peers, and online sources influence non-experts’ perceptions and behaviors toward smart home IoT devices. We surveyed 263 participants, collecting narratives that either positively or negatively influenced their perception of IoT devices, which they retold in text and comic formats to encourage deeper reflection. Thematic analysis of the narratives, combined with quantitative survey data, reveals that stories significantly impact trust and willingness to use and adopt IoT devices. Negative stories, particularly those concerning security, privacy, and device unreliability, reduced trust and usage, while positive stories about home safety through monitoring and improved quality of life increased interest in IoT devices. Perceptions of different IoT devices varied based on the themes associated with the stories. The findings highlight the powerful role of storytelling in driving consumer acceptance of technology.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713712
Hubs are at the core of most smart homes. Modern cross-ecosystem protocols and standards enable smart home hubs to achieve interoperability across devices, offering the unique opportunity to integrate universally available smart home privacy awareness and control features. To date, such privacy features mainly focus on individual products or prototypical research artifacts. We developed a cross-ecosystem hub featuring a tangible dashboard and a digital web application to deepen our understanding of how smart home users interact with functional privacy features. The ecosystem allows users to control the connectivity states of their devices and raises awareness by visualizing device positions, states, and data flows. We deployed the ecosystem in six households for one week and found that it increased participants' perceived control, awareness, and understanding of smart home privacy. We further found distinct differences between tangible and digital mechanisms. Our findings highlight the value of cross-ecosystem hubs for effective privacy management.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713517
The advancement of Vision-Language Model (VLM) camera sensors, which enable autonomous understanding of household situations without user intervention, has the potential to completely transform the DIY smart home building experience. Will this simplify or complicate the DIY smart home process? Additionally, what features do users want to create using these sensors? To explore this, we conducted a three-week diary-based experience prototyping study with 12 participants. Participants recorded their daily activities, used GPT to analyze the images, and manually customized and tested smart home features based on the analysis. The study revealed three key findings: (1) participants’ expectations for VLM camera-based smart homes, (2) the impact of VLM camera sensor characteristics on the DIY process, and (3) users’ concerns. Through the findings of this study, we propose design implications to support the DIY smart home building process with VLM camera sensors, and discuss living with intelligence.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713265