Finding roles for interactive furniture in homes with EmotoCouch

Abstract

Furniture is the building block of the spaces we inhabit. Its design and its functions shape how we use spaces, as individuals and as groups. While being an integral part of our lives, furniture is unaware of what happens around it. But what if furniture could change its appearance? What situations should it respond to? How might it communicate its state to those around it? Can we use emotional expression for such communication? To find and explore roles for interactive furniture in domestic spaces, we built EmotoCouch: a provocative prototype that uses combinations of color, patterns, and haptics designed to convey emotions. We gathered feedback to the concept of an emotional couch from an online study with 138 participants and in a laboratory study with 14 parent-child pairs. To find and explore roles for interactive furniture in domestic spaces, we built EmotoCouch: a provocative prototype that uses combinations of color, patterns, and haptics designed to convey emotions. We gathered feedback to the concept of an emotional couch from an online study with 138 participants and in a laboratory study with 14 parent-child pairs. Our findings identify promising future directions, use cases, and opportunities for the use of emotion for expressive communication by furniture.

Soft Speakers: Digital Embroidering of DIY Customizable Fabric Actuators

“…Researchers have explored the potential of interactive furniture and soft furnishing at home, with examples ranging from hard objects such as tables [9], chairs [42] and lamps [21] to soft furnishing such as upholstered chairs [28], sofas [22], carpets [46], table-cloths [23,49] and curtains [48]. Instead of introducing new gadgets and devices to our living spaces, such interactive designs augmented pre-existing home objects with sensing and/or actuation within the fabric of our surrounding environment itself.…”

“…Such prior work on interactive furniture focused on exploring user experience in interacting and/or living with such everyday things as computational objects. Findings showed how embedding interactivity within everyday artifacts can support social engagement [21,23,48], self-reflection [9,22,46] and self-expression [49]. The interactivity embedded included soft sensing [23] and feedback in the form of display of information [42,48] or actuation (such as motion, colour-change [22,46], pattern-change [9] and shape-change [23]).…”

ActuEating

“…Examples of shapechanging interior objects in HCI research include the Earthquake Shelf [34], the colour-changing DigitalLace [36] and the Byobu room-divider [32]. Examples of shape-changing furniture include the colour-changing EmotoCouch [24], the shape-changing table/board [16] and coMotion [17], a horizontal shape-changing bench that changes its height and angle using 8 embedded linear actuator 'motors'. The study of co-Motion gathered insights from 120 'unaware' members of the public who interacted with it (each for around 2mins).…”

Building Change

“…Research on smart domestic environments incorporates a number of methodologies, including living labs [11,13,25], ethnography [4,16,27,28,29] and field-testing of new technologies in the homes of residents [10,17,21,23,25,26]. Living labs often explore the implementation of embedded systems, distributed I/O and machine learning to make the home itself intelligent.…”

“…More recently, efforts such as Schwartz et al's study of consumptive feedback and home energy management systems (HEMS) challenge both the definition and limitation of living labs by implementing new technologies in resident domiciles while maintaining experimental controls [25]. This evolving definition employs similar practices to a number of less experimentally rigorous studies involving technology probes [10], including the Digital Family Portraits [23] HomeNote [26], Tableau Machine [21] and EmotoCouch [17] projects.…”