Understanding Family Collaboration Around Lightweight Modification of Everyday Objects in the Home

Abstract

The internet-of-things (IoT) carries substantial costs by urging households to replace their possessions with new, internet connected versions of everyday objects. Beyond financial, these costs include waste, work to arrange and orchestrate objects to suit households, and that of acquiring new skills. Upcycling domestic objects could offer households greater discretion and control over these costs by supporting the ability to tailor IoT to the home. To understand how households might do this, we conducted a home study with 10 diverse American households over 7 days to surface the approaches families are likely to use when tailoring IoT to their existing possessions. We asked family members to enact their process using endowed sticker props-IoT Stickers-to modify objects in their home. We develop a framework of how families make light weight modifications of domestic possessions, summarize trends of their object modifications, and describe the burdens such a system could impose. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in interaction design; Ubiquitous computing; HCI theory, concepts and models.

An Upcycled IoT

“…We ran an experience prototyping study with 10 diverse, American families to develop a framework of the dimensions of home life implicated when families tailor an IoT system to their domestic possessions [2]. When families do so, they suspend belief in the current home to consider how objects and rooms might be reconfigured.…”

IoT Stickers

“…Shape successfully conveys affordances of end-user programming languages in GUIs by constraining what expressions can be composed to those that are permissible in the language [19,7]. Yet, GUIs are malleable materials that displace the rich, integrated practices people have [13,11], and this kind of displacement is especially problematic for domestic IoT [23,24]. Instead, tangible user interfaces (TUIs) can use form to constrain what can be expressed while encouraging non-experts to tinker and experiment with physical artifacts to develop expertise [19,13].…”

“…Many domestic IoT systems sense home dwellers' behavior so that a system might intelligently augment the home (e.g., [14]). However, the artifacts of the home carry layers of social meaning and are sites of negotiation between family members [23,24]. To make these domestic systems 'intelligent' within this social context, we would need AI-complete systems, and families would have to be willing to accept and defer to these 'intelligent agents' within their interpersonal negotiations (both, dubious assumptions).…”

“…For example, many IoT devices tend to cost at least 10's if not 100's of $US [4], and this makes them ill-suited for one time interactions like notifying the user that their supply is depleted. Beyond financial costs, there are many social costs for even those IoT devices that manage to drive the price point down to make their extension to replaceable items-like lightbulbs-viable [23,24]. Replacement contributes to waste, and if electronic, can be especially damaging [12,18].…”

“…Everyday objects would not need replaced with internet-enabled equivalents if upcycling could support their renewal by retrofitting them with the latest computing capabilities. A class of technologies that I call IoT Stickers makes this approach possible [23]. They enable battery-free, wireless sensing using low cost-and in some cases do-ityourself-fabrication methods of custom traces on a flexible substrate like sticker paper.…”