Exploring DIY Practices of Complex Home Technologies

Abstract

We are surrounded by increasingly complex networks of smart objects, yet our understanding and attachment to them is rather limited. One way to support stronger end users' engagement with such complex technologies is by involving them in the design process and, with the advent of Arduino prototyping platform, even in their making. While DIY practice offers the potential for stronger user engagement with physical artifacts, we know little about end users' DIY practice of making complex electronic technologies and their potential to ensure engagement with such devices. In this paper, we report on interviews with 18 participants from two green communities who built and used an open source DIY energy monitor, with the aim to explore the end users DIY practices of making such complex electronic devices. Findings indicate four key qualities of DIY monitors: transparent modularity, open-endedness, heirloom and disruptiveness, and how they contribute to more meaningful engagement with the DIY monitors, elevating them from the status of unremarkable objects to that of things. We conclude with three implications for design for supporting end user development of complex electronic DIY: designing transparent open hardware technologies, standardizing communication protocols for the current and future DIY of IoT; and deliberately calling for personal investment and labor in the assembling of DIY kits.

Towards Affective Chronometry

“…We have presented different material qualities, their affordances and how they foster different reflections which designers can consider when deciding which such modalities. Future work will focus on building a DIY toolkit with modularized components [70] of different actuators that can be plugged and played with biosensors. Such kit may be used for codesigning with therapists to better tailor it to the needs of people living with affective disorders such as depression [60,68].…”

Design for Songket Weaving in Malay Cottage Industry

“…Although weavers have initiatives to enlarge their business, they have mobility constraints having to work from home. This opens the design opportunities for novel tools requiring limited digital literacy [12] for empowering weavers through online presence to showcase their craft for reaching new customers. Such tools could also support weavers' access to supply chain so that they can collaboratively purchase affordable materials in bulk promoting a co-operative model for community-based enterprise in this developing context.…”

BlocKit

“…The distinction between novices' and expert's mental model is an important one, with consistent findings indicating that the latter is more accurate, complex, and abstract [11] [12][23] enabling a deeper understanding of the inner working of a system rather than merely how it can be used. In addition, a wealth of findings has shown that people have limited mental models of technological systems, such as personal or home technologies, including appliances [8][62] [67] or energy monitors [77]. Such systems tend to be operated from superficial functional models rather than structural ones.…”

“…While much of previous work focused on mental models of interactive systems [6], learning environment [30] [44] or complex home technologies [77], much less work explored the mental models of large-scale distributed systems or technological infrastructures such as blockchain. We argue for a new approach to explore the mental models of such infrastructures by materializing them through physical representations.…”