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Technological objects present themselves as necessary, only to become obsolete faster than ever before. This phenomenon has led to a population that experiences a plethora of technological objects and interfaces as they age, which become associated with certain stages of life and disappear thereafter. Noting the expanding body of literature within HCI about appropriation, our work pinpoints an area that needs more attention, “outdated technologies.” In other words, we assert that design practices can profit as much from imaginaries of the future as they can from reassessing artefacts from the past in a critical way. In a two-week fieldwork with 37 HCI students, we gathered an international collection of nostalgic devices from 14 different countries to investigate what memories people still have of older technologies and the ways in which these memories reveal normative and accidental use of technological objects. We found that participants primarily remembered older technologies with positive connotations and shared memories of how they had adapted and appropriated these technologies, rather than normative uses. We refer to this phenomenon as nostalgic reminiscence. In the future, we would like to develop this concept further by discussing how nostalgic reminiscence can be operationalized to stimulate speculative design in the present.
New cars are increasingly "connected" by default. Since not having a car is not an option for many people, understanding the privacy implications of driving connected cars and using their data-based services is an even more pressing issue than for expendable consumer products. While risk-based approaches to privacy are well established in law, they have only begun to gain traction in HCI. These approaches are understood not only to increase acceptance but also to help consumers make choices that meet their needs. To the best of our knowledge, perceived risks in the context of connected cars have not been studied before. To address this gap, our study reports on the analysis of a survey with 18 open-ended questions distributed to 1,000 households in a medium-sized German city. Our findings provide qualitative insights into existing attitudes and use cases of connected car features and, most importantly, a list of perceived risks themselves. Taking the perspective of consumers, we argue that these can help inform consumers about data use in connected cars in a user-friendly way. Finally, we show how these risks fit into and extend existing risk taxonomies from other contexts with a stronger social perspective on risks of data use.
Residential and commercial buildings are responsible for about 40% of the EU’s total energy consumption. However, conscious, sustainable use of this limited resource is hampered by a lack of visibility and materiality of consumption. One of the major challenges is enabling consumers to make informed decisions about energy consumption, thereby supporting the shift to sustainable actions. With the use of Energy-Management-Systems it is possible to save up to 15%. In recent years, design approaches have greatly diversified, but with the emergence of ubiquitous- and context-aware computing, energy feedback solutions can be enriched with additional context information. In this study, we present the concept “room as a context” for eco-feedback systems. We investigate opportunities of making current state-of-the-art energy visualizations more meaningful and demonstrate which new forms of visualizations can be created with this additional information. Furthermore, we developed a prototype for android-based tablets, which includes some of the presented features to study our design concepts in the wild.
When dialogues with voice assistants (VAs) fall apart, users often become confused or even frustrated. To address these issues and related privacy concerns, Amazon recently introduced a feature allowing Alexa users to inquire about why it behaved in a certain way. But how do users perceive this new feature? In this paper, we present preliminary results from research conducted as part of a three-year project involving 33 German households. This project utilized interviews, fieldwork, and co-design workshops to identify common unexpected behaviors of VAs, as well as users’ needs and expectations for explanations. Our findings show that, contrary to its intended purpose, the new feature actually exacerbates user confusion and frustration instead of clarifying Alexa's behavior. We argue that such voice interactions should be characterized as explanatory dialogs that account for VA’s unexpected behavior by providing interpretable information and prompting users to take action to improve their current and future interactions.
Since stationary self-checkout is widely introduced and well understood, previous research barely examined newer generations of smartphone-based Scan&Go. Especially from a design perspective, we know little about the factors contributing to the adoption of Scan&Go solutions and how design enables consumers to take full advantage of this development rather than being burdened with using complex and unenjoyable systems. To understand the influencing factors and the design from a consumer perspective, we conducted a mixed-methods study where we triangulated data of an online survey with 103 participants and a qualitative study with 20 participants. Based on the results, our study presents a refined and nuanced understanding of technology as well as infrastructure-related factors that influence adoption. Moreover, we present several implications for designing and implementing of Scan&Go in retail environments.
The smart home of the future is typically researched in lab settings or apartments that have been built from scratch. However, comparing the lifecycle of buildings and information technology, it is evident that modernization strategies and technologies are needed to empower residents to modify and extend their homes to make it smarter. In this paper, we describe a case study about the deployment, adaption to and adoption of tailorable home energy management systems in 7 private households. Based on this experience, we want to discuss how hardware and software technologies should be designed so that people could build their own smart home with a high usability and user experience.
Reducing energy consumption is one of the most pursued economic and ecologic challenges concerning societies as a whole, individuals and organizations alike. While politics start taking measures for energy turnaround and smart home energy monitors are becoming popular, few studies have touched on sustainability in office environments so far, though they account for almost every second workplace in modern economics. In this paper, we present findings of two parallel studies in an organizational context using behavioral change oriented strategies to raise energy awareness. Next to demonstrating potentials, it shows that energy feedback needs must fit to the local organizational context to succeed and should consider typical work patterns to foster accountability of consumption.
Reducing energy consumption is one of the most pursued economic and ecologic challenges concerning societies as a whole, individuals and organizations alike. While politics start taking measures for energy turnaround and smart home energy monitors are becoming popular, few studies have touched on sustainability in office environments so far, though they account for almost every second workplace in modern economics. In this paper, we present findings of two parallel studies in an organizational context using behavioral change oriented strategies to raise energy awareness. Next to demonstrating potentials, it shows that energy feedback needs must fit to the local organizational context to succeed and should consider typical work patterns to foster accountability of consumption.
Frequently the main purpose of domestic artifacts equipped with smart sensors is to hide technology, like previous examples of a Smart Mirror show. However, current Smart Homes often fail to provide meaningful IoT applications for all residents’ needs. To design beyond efficiency and productivity, we propose to realize the potential of the traditional artifact for calm and engaging experiences. Therefore, we followed a design case study approach with 22 participants in total. After an initial focus group, we conducted a diary study to examine home routines and developed a conceptual design. The evaluation of our mid-fidelity prototype shows, that we need to study carefully the practices of the residents to leverage the physical material of the artifact to fit the routines. Our Smart Mirror, enhanced by digital qualities, supports meaningful activities and makes the bathroom more appealing. Thereby, we discuss domestic technology design beyond automation.
Recent publications propose concepts of systems that integrate the various services and data sources of everyday food practices. However, this research does not go beyond the conceptualization of such systems. Therefore, there is a deficit in understanding how to combine different services and data sources and which design challenges arise from building integrated Household Information Systems. In this paper, we probed the design of an Integrated Household Information System with 13 participants. The results point towards more personalization, automatization of storage administration and enabling flexible artifact ecologies. Our paper contributes to understanding the design and usage of Integrated Household Information Systems, as a new class of information systems for HCI research.
Smart home systems change the way we experience the home. While there are established research fields within HCI for visualizing specific use cases of a smart home, studies targeting user demands on visualizations spanning across multiple use cases are rare. Especially, individual data-related demands pose a challenge for usable visualizations. To investigate potentials of an end-user development (EUD) approach for flexibly supporting such demands, we developed a smart home system featuring both pre-defined visualizations and a visualization creation tool. To evaluate our concept, we installed our prototype in 12 households as part of a Living Lab study. Results are based on three interview studies, a design workshop and system log data. We identified eight overarching interests in home data and show how participants used pre-defined visualizations to get an overview and the creation tool to not only address specific use cases but also to answer questions by creating temporary visualizations.
Taste is a complex phenomenon that depends on the individual experience and is a matter of collective negotiation and mediation. On the contrary, it is uncommon to include taste and its many facets in everyday design, particularly online shopping for fresh food products. To realize this unused potential, we conducted two Co-Design workshops. Based on the participants’ results in the workshops, we prototyped and evaluated a click-dummy smart-phone app to explore consumers’ needs for digital taste depiction. We found that emphasizing the natural qualities of food products, external reviews, and personalizing features lead to a reflection on the individual taste experience. The self-reflection through our design enables consumers to develop their taste competencies and thus strengthen their autonomy in decision-making. Ultimately, exploring taste as a social experience adds to a broader understanding of taste beyond a sensory phenomenon.
So far, sustainable HCI has mainly focused on the domestic context, but there is a growing body of work looking at the organizational context. As in the domestic context, these works still rest on psychological theories for behaviour change used for the domestic context. We supplement this view with an organizational theory-informed approach that adopts organizational roles as a key element. We will show how a role-based analysis could be applied to uncover information needs and to give em-ployee’s eco-feedback, which is linked to their tasks at hand. We illustrate the approach on a qualitative case study that was part of a broader, ongoing action research conducted in a German production company.
Focus on what matters: improved feature selection techniques for personal thermal comfort modelling
(2022)
Occupants' personal thermal comfort (PTC) is indispensable for their well-being, physical and mental health, and work efficiency. Predicting PTC preferences in a smart home can be a prerequisite to adjusting the indoor temperature for providing a comfortable environment. In this research, we focus on identifying relevant features for predicting PTC preferences. We propose a machine learning-based predictive framework by employing supervised feature selection techniques. We apply two feature selection techniques to select the optimal sets of features to improve the thermal preference prediction performance. The experimental results on a public PTC dataset demonstrated the efficiency of the feature selection techniques that we have applied. In turn, our PTC prediction framework with feature selection techniques achieved state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy, Cohen's kappa, and area under the curve (AUC), outperforming conventional methods.
In Software development, the always beta principle is used to successfully develop innovation based on early and continuous user feedback. In this paper we discuss how this principle could be adapted to the special needs of designing for the Smart Home, where we do not just take care of the software, but also release hardware components. In particular, because of the 'materiality' of the Smart Home one could not just make a beta version available on the web, but an essential part of the development process is also to visit the 'beta' users in their home, to build trust, to face the real world issues and provide assistance to make the Smart Home work for them. After presenting our case study, we will then discuss the challenges we faced and how we dealt with them.
Critical consumerism is complex as ethical values are difficult to negotiate, appropriate products are hard to find, and product information is overwhelming. Although recommender systems offer solutions to reduce such complexity, current designs are not appropriate for niche practices and use non-personalized intransparent ethics. To support critical consumption, we conducted a design case study on a personalized food recommender system. Therefore, we first conducted an empirical pre-study with 24 consumers to understand value negotiations and current practices, co-designed the recommender system, and finally evaluated it in a real-world trial with ten consumers. Our findings show how recommender systems can support the negotiation of ethical values within the context of consumption practices, reduce the complexity of finding products and stores, and strengthen consumers. In addition to providing implications for the design to support critical consumption practices, we critically reflect on the scope of such recommender systems and its appropriation.
In 1991 the researchers at the center for the Learning Sciences of Carnegie Mellon University were confronted with the confusing question of “where is AI” from the users, who were interacting with AI but did not realize it. Three decades of research and we are still facing the same issue with the AItechnology users. In the lack of users’ awareness and mutual understanding of AI-enabled systems between designers and users, informal theories of the users about how a system works (“Folk theories”) become inevitable but can lead to misconceptions and ineffective interactions. To shape appropriate mental models of AI-based systems, explainable AI has been suggested by AI practitioners. However, a profound understanding of the current users’ perception of AI is still missing. In this study, we introduce the term “Perceived AI” as “AI defined from the perspective of its users”. We then present our preliminary results from deep-interviews with 50 AItechnology users, which provide a framework for our future research approach towards a better understanding of PAI and users’ folk theories.