User interaction with everyday lighting systems

Abstract

New lighting technologies create new opportunities that may contribute to people's experience of light. These opportunities are a result of the increased variety and freedom in terms of colour, form factor and connectivity of the lights. To allow people to fully benefit from the potential of such novel lighting systems, there is a need for a new user interaction paradigm. To develop this paradigm, we have to better understand the aspects that play a part in the interaction with lighting, paying special attention to people's motivation for interaction. This paper reports on a context-mapping study that was performed to gain insight in these aspects. As result, we present a set of seven themes that regard the interaction with lighting in the current situation and in the future. These themes provide an overview of the relevant aspects in this domain and contain considerations and opportunities for the design of new interfaces for novel lighting systems. We conclude that people have different levels of lighting needs that are highly dependent on context and that also require control at different levels. The context and lighting needs have a large influence on the extent to which people are motivated to adjust their lighting. Moreover, the lighting interface itself has a large effect on this motivation, mainly influenced by the degrees of freedom, the control location and availability, the degree of automation and general interaction qualities.

A perspective on multi-user interaction design based on an understanding of domestic lighting conflicts

“…Also, because of the designed triggers, people interacted even less with the light to avoid possible conflicts or undesired influence on others. This was also found by Offermans et al [23]. The interpersonal conflicts, even though small in number, matched the conflict types of the previous study: we observed a preference, an activity, and an attitude conflict.…”

“…A perceived conflict is noticed by some or all parties but is not explicated like a manifest conflict is [10]. We expect, based on the findings by Offermans et al [23], that in lighting many conflicts remain latent. Interestingly, Deutsch found that conflict is not necessarily negative: conflict can be productive in the sense that it can stimulate curiosity, prevents stagnation, and leads to social change [29].…”

“…With respect to understanding real-life domestic lighting use, most related to the work presented in this paper is the study done by Offermans et al [23] and Lucero et al [51]. Offermans and colleagues investigate the needs, wishes, and motivations for interaction with lighting in the home environment.…”

“…We also aim to gain insights on the impact that conflicts have on the social setting and the resolution strategies that people deploy. Since the home environment is difficult to observe first hand and since interacting with lighting is usually done unaware [23], we make use probes from a perspective of information gathering [52] or data collection [53]. Probes provide a way to gather data about a person's context through exercises and self-documentation in order to frame new challenges, inspire design, and create a dialogue.…”

“…Research from cognitive psychology, however, shows that preferences are constructed in the moment instead of elicited from memory [22], which makes them less static than the preference ratings in user profiles suggest. Also, incontext research on lighting use by Offermans et al [23] has shown that people's lighting needs and preferences are mainly latent and that they depend heavily on the environment, people's intentions with the environment, and the social context. So it seems that current strategies to handle conflicts underestimate the complexity of preference elicitation, which makes it unlikely that their identification and resolution of conflicts matches the social setting.…”