As part of the process of designing new technologies for the home we did a series of studies of the use of existing technologies.
Household Studies
We interviewed twelve people in seven households about their current use of technology in their homes. We visited people at home and got them to give us a tour of their house and asked them to talk about any of the technology that we could see.
Smart Home Studies
We interviewed two companies that install "Smart Home" technologies to get an idea of the kinds of things that people will pay for when money is little or no object. Also we wanted to get an idea of the common problems that occur in homes that have all of the latest modern gadgets.
Sensor Questionnaires
We ran an online questionnaire which asked people about their experiences of using everyday sensors such as thermostats, smoke alarms and burglar alarms.
Emerging Themes
The themes discussed below emerged from our experiences in the several studies that we conducted. The intent is to use these themes as inspirations for the next stage in the design process.
Not working, Not Used, the Need for Know-How
Many of the pieces of technology that we found in people's home were not working and therefore not used. Often this was because the people who lived in the house lack some crucial skills or knowledge to make the technology work. Many technologies in today's homes are complicated and difficult to install and configure. Some researchers have suggested that the need to go outside of the house to get know-how may not necessarily be a bad thing. Perhaps getting your father or son to come around and help you install your PC is a useful piece of family bonding as well as information exchange. In our next phase of design we hope to explore the possibility of creating technologies which somehow include a community of support in their use, perhaps as personal computing did in it's very beginnings as a "hobbyist".
Alternernative Routes into the Home
A large number of the technological applicances that we saw in people's homes had not been bought from new. They had been handed down from family members or had been boughts as presents. This is face that tends to be overlooked in many discussions of the "Home of the Future". It seems very likely that in any home of the future a large proportion of the technologies will be from the home (or other people's homes) of the past. As Stuart Brand outlines so elegantly in his book "How Buildings Learn", even if a house were to be built from scratch and fitted with all the latest technology, from the minute it began to be used different aspects of the house would change at different rates. Sooner or later some of the technology in the house would be old and some of it would be new. As we move into our next phase of design, we are interested to look at the possibility of design technologies which piggy back on technologies which are already present in the house, or lead to the use of technologies which are already present in different ways.
Gender and Power
Many studies of the domestic environment highlight the importance of gender roles. We also found that gender differences were an important part of the domestic environments of the homes that we studied. One very compelling example is the issue of diary keeping. Several calendar applications for the home of the future have been proposed which imagine the calendar in a public place (typically the door of the fridge) where it can be interacted with by all members of the family who can reach it. What would happen if such an application were to be installed in a house where currently the diary is kept in the handbag of the diary keeper (typically the woman of the house). Would this be OK with her? How would she react to this shift of power?
We also noticed some other notable asymmetries in which the man of the house seemed to have the upper hand. In two of our homes the controls to the heating were either the sole preserve of the man of the house, or use of the heating contol by the woman of the house was restricted.
This gives rise to several questions as we go into the design process. How does this "power landscape" affect the kinds of designs that can be introduced into the domestic environment and how they can be used? How should we react to it? Should we subvert it, support it, acknowledge it or ignore it?
Strange Information
Many envisaged applications for the home of the future see the possibility of being able to access all the information that is stored in the house, either from some central point (again, some kind of display on the fridge seems popular) or from many different points around the house, or even from a mobile device while away from the house. Quite what this information would be is not dicussed at such length, although appointment/calendar information is frequently mentioned. We were interested therefore by some of the answers that we got when we asked the people in the homes we visited what kind of information they would like to know about the house that they lived in. One couple, who were very concerned about ecological issues said that they would like to know how windy it was on their roof because they were considering putting a windmill up there. Another woman said that she would like to know more about the history of the house. Another couple said that they would like to have the documentation for all the appliances that came with their newly-built house, also a scheme which showed the location of the wiring and the water and central heating pipes. In our next phase of design we're interested to explore further kinds of strange/unusual information that people might like to find out about their homes and explore ways of collecting and presenting this information.
 |
|
Unreliable Sensors
People's relationship to the sensors in their houses is peculiar. In our online survey 70 percent of respondents said that their smoke alarm worked properly but then of those people 70 percent said that there smoke alarm had gone off in a situation where there wasn't a fire. In one case the smoke alarm went off when the central heating was turned up too high. In three of the seven houses that we visited the occupants said that the thermostat for their central heating didn't work properly but they had no plans to replace or repair it. Burglar alarms were also unreliable in a number of ways. In two out of the seven houses that we visited the burglar alarm went off in the event of a power cut. It is interesting to note both the poor performance of some of the most everyday sensors in people's homes and also the willingness of people to live with and adapt to this poor performance. Some of the homes of the future that have been describe - such as the place lab at MIT are fitted with tens if not hundreds of sensors. This raises the spector of uses being forced into all sorts of peculiar behaviours to "limbo" around poorly function sensors. In our next phase of design we're interested to investigate what it might be like to give the users more control over the way the output from these sensors is interpreted. Why, for example do smoke alarms rarely have a "This is not a fire" button so that users can stop them when they know that the cause of the alarm is their burnt toast. Are there ways of allowing users to interact with poorly functioning sensors which leave control in the hands of the user?
References
Some of these are referred to in the above text, some of them are just interesting reads if you're interested in designing technologies for a domestic environment.
See Also:
Curball - Dagmar Kern's work on games in the home for older people.
Publications :
Stringer, M., Fitzpatrick. G., Harris, E. (2006) Lessons for the Future: Experiences with the installation and use of today's domestic sensors and technologies. In Proceedings 4th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2006). Dublin Ireland May 2006, Springer-Verlag LNCS, pp383-399.
Fitzpatrick, G., and Stringer, M. "Exploring technology influences between home, work and school: implications for managing
ubiquitous technologies in the home" to appear at HOIT 2007, Chenai, India.
People
Mark Stringer, Geraldine Fitzpatrick and Eric Harris (with help from Manuela Jungmann, Eva Hornecker, Paul Marshall, Rowanne Fleck and Dagmar Kern).
