Of Smarthomes, IoT Plants, and Implicit Interaction Design

Abstract

There seems to be a danger to carelessly replace routine tasks in homes through automation with IoT-technology. But since routines such as watering houseplants also have positive influences on inhabitants' wellbeing, they should be transformed through carefully performed designs. To this end, an attempt to use technology for augmenting a set of houseplants' nonverbal communication capabilities is presented. First, we describe in detail how implicit interactions have been designed to support inhabitants in watering their plants through meaningful interactions. Then, we report on a field study with 24 participants, comparing two alternative design implementations based on contrasting embodied interaction technologies (i.e., augmented reality and embedded computing technology). The study results highlight shortcomings of today's smartphone mediated augmented reality compared to physical interface alternatives, considering measurements of perceived attractiveness and expected effects on determinants of wellbeing, and discusses potentials of combining both modalities for future solutions.

Understanding the Experiences of Remote Workers: Opportunities for Ambient Workspaces at Home

“…Within this context, the argument for ambient technologies to support the remote home workers falls into place. Ambient systems have been previously used to mitigate "always-on" environments (Stawarz et al, 2013;Toch et al, 2020), and to support mental and physical wellbeing in various domestic and health applications (Weiser and Brown, 1995;Ludden and Meekhof, 2016;Bittner et al, 2019;Wohn et al, 2020).…”

“…Highly relevant to workplace needs, various types of ambient systems (Weiser and Brown, 1995;Ludden and Meekhof, 2016) can present information in the periphery without distracting or burdening the users, helping in prioritisation and cognitive easing (Pousman and Stasko, 2006;Caraban et al, 2019). Examples of ambient systems include adaptive architectures -subtle changes in an architectural space (Schnädelbach et al, 2012;Dalton, 2016;Yannoudes, 2016;Nabil et al, 2017a,b;Jäger, 2017;Bader et al, 2019;Schnädelbach and Kirk, 2019), connected sensing objects -IoT (Bittner et al, 2019), or light feedback (Fortmann et al, 2013;Davis et al, 2016;Pereira et al, 2016). Focusing on ambient technology research for the workplace, we briefly highlight examples from HBI, HCI and Ubicomp literature.…”

Let Me Show You Your New Home: Studying the Effect of Proxemic-awareness of Robots on Users’ First Impressions

“…While stationary computer systems e.g. in smart homes only are able to react to proxemic behavior of users (e.g., [16]), virtual agents can at least use their body orientation and gaze behavior (e.g., [17]) to show proxemic behavior. Bee et al [18] used only the orientation dimension utilizing gaze in a "first impression scenario" to get into interaction with a human.…”

Towards Somaesthetic Smarthome Designs

“…Recent developments in computing and design propagate designs for well-being (e.g., [7,15,37]), mindfulness (e.g., [3,47]), (soma)esthetic appreciation [21], mental and physical health (e.g., [9,13,35]). To this end, researcher build on foundations and advances in affective computing and user experience research and take inspirations from emerging (interdisciplinary) fields, such as positive computing [10], somaesthetics [38], and mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) [23].…”