Bystander privacy in smart homes has been widely studied in Western contexts, yet it remains underexplored in non-Western countries such as China. In this study, we analyze 49 Chinese smart home apps using a mixed-methods approach, including privacy policy review, UX/UI evaluation, and assessment of Apple App Store privacy labels. While most apps nominally comply with national regulations, we identify significant gaps between written policies and actual implementation. Our traceability analysis highlights inconsistencies in data controls and a lack of transparency in data-sharing practices. Crucially, bystander privacy---particularly for visitors and non-user individuals---is largely absent from both policy documents and interface design. Additionally, discrepancies between privacy labels and actual data practices threaten user trust and undermine informed consent. We provide design recommendations to strengthen bystander protections, improve privacy-oriented UI transparency, and enhance the credibility of privacy labels, supporting the development of inclusive smart home ecosystems in non-Western contexts.
Smart building design has predominantly focused on interactive experiences that enhance human comfort across measurable dimensions, namely thermal, respiratory, visual, and acoustic comfort. In contrast, architectural practices attend to inhabitation as subjective, situated, lived, and socially embedded experiences. This creates a gap between what can be sensed and regulated, and the complexity of human experiences in buildings. We argue that an Affective Interaction (AfI) lens offers a way to bridge this gap and deepen the role of interaction design research in architecture. We illustrate this through two exploratory studies using open-ended, in-situ methods that foreground lived experience and social interpretation. The AfI perspective revealed five Ways in which occupants interpret smart environments, from reading bodily cues and forecasting disruption to making sense of building automation. From these, we distil six Affective Practices and six Interaction Qualities that guide the future of interaction design research in buildings.
A homeowner controls their smart home devices along a spectrum of approaches, ranging from physical device control to various proxy-based control modalities. This paper studies how and why users move along this spectrum in their day-to-day lives, building upon existing research that focused only on specific interactions. We surveyed smart home owners (N=43 users), and conducted follow-up interviews with a subset of the survey participants (N=8). Our studies allow us to both distill specific contexts and experiences of smart home owners as they navigate the control spectrum, as well as to describe how their experiences (both positive and negative) shape their tendencies to control devices in a particular way. These insights lead us to propose practical implications for designers and researchers of smart home management systems, including the need to support flexible control scheme transitions, reduce switching costs, and account for temporal and spatial heterogeneity in the evaluation and design of control systems.
As domestic environments are increasingly required to meet diverse and changing human needs within constrained spaces, physical reconfigurability offers a promising solution. We developed a full-scale, manipulable room prototype as an exploratory co-design instrument, enabling participants to bodily explore and reflect on reconfigurable living spaces. Through 12 sessions with 30 participants involving brainstorming, bodystorming, and interviews, we identified spatial design patterns and elicited perspectives on reconfigurable domestic environments. Our findings contribute a design pattern catalogue for reconfigurable spaces, alongside insights into the lived experience of reconfigurability. We also discuss design principles, three affordance-based design dimensions that capture value tensions: empowering vs. restrictive, utilitarian vs. hedonic, and futuristic vs. practical, as well as lessons from co-design with a room-scale prototype. We demonstrate agile, room-scale prototyping as a methodological approach for spatial HCI research, advancing toward human-computer habitation, where interactive systems become inhabited built environments that support human values, creativity, and autonomy.
User-facing communication about privacy (e.g., privacy policies, privacy tools' user interfaces) is frequently ignored and often ineffective. In contrast to these arguably staid interfaces, artworks often focus on provocation, engagement, and critical interpretation. For decades, artists have created privacy art—artistic media in galleries relating to the surveillance and privacy of individuals. What are artists saying about privacy, and how? Crucially, what lessons might they have for designing privacy-focused user interfaces? To this end, we compiled over 800 privacy artworks, qualitatively analyzing a sample. Common topics spanned artistic media (from paintings to immersive installations) and eras. Artworks built upon familiar concepts (e.g., cameras, homes) to speculate on society's future and present personal information (e.g., artist, viewer, public). We discuss lessons for making non-artistic privacy communication more engaging and powerful through directing attention (e.g., lighting, collage) and setting a tone (e.g., unsettling, fun, mundane).
Climate change is intensifying extreme heat, prompting cities to deploy environmental sensor networks to capture hyperlocal conditions. However, top-down deployments that produce data without public input often fail to align with community needs. This paper presents a participatory design study of a high-density environmental sensor network co-developed with a volunteer-run community orchard as part of a city-wide system for heat resilience. Through two participatory design workshops, orchard volunteers acted as co-designers by collaboratively defining the network’s purpose, selecting sensor locations, and identifying key environmental data outputs. The workshops functioned as sites of infrastructuring—building relationships, technical literacy, and shared understanding—while situating environmental data within the orchard's place-based practices of stewardship. From this process, we derive design criteria for community-driven sensor networks that prioritize both technical function and public formation. These contributions extend participatory design approaches in HCI and offer guidance for future deployments of environmental sensing technologies in community and urban agriculture contexts.
Domestic appliances and objects are increasingly augmented with data-driven "smart" capabilities. Such Smart Home Devices (SHDs) may receive data directly from users, observe their surroundings with sensors, or infer/predict information through computation. We conducted a scenario-based questionnaire study across multiple regions to investigate user perceptions and expectations regarding the handling of these three types of data associated with SHDs. We systematically varied the scenarios across participants to examine whether the level of ambiguity in the description of an SHD influences user perceptions and expectations regarding its data-handling operations. The study included four SHDs that differed in complexity (two complex and two simple) as a within-subjects treatment. We found that reducing ambiguity in describing SHD operations fosters greater user understanding while increasing privacy concerns about data handling, with notable variations in effects across data types, device complexity, and region. Our findings can be applied to enhance user awareness and control of data handling in the SHD context and inform SHD-specific data protection regulation.