Seemingly simple smart home sensor data, such as temperature or humidity, can lead to conflicts between involved stakeholders, such as users, their partners, or landlords. To understand potential mitigation strategies in product design, we conducted seven scenario-based workshops with 38 tech practitioners and academics. We asked them to prototype smart home device packages that showcase how conflicts caused by simple sensor data could be minimized in product design. The strategies they employed are: 1) reducing data granularity on the visual layer; 2) minimizing data storage; 3) offering more sensor data explainability; 4) increasing trust through strict data regulations. We contribute applicable design strategies for mitigating tensions for simple sensor systems developed by tech experts illustrated with examples.

Soft toys foster strong and enduring early childhood attachments, with positive effects extending into adulthood. Smart toys are vulnerable to exploits and can harm users. Bridging this contrast, pairs of smart objects, equipped with only simple sensors and actuators, may support peripheral and emotional awareness. At the same time, how exactly such pairs should negotiate the soft/smart spectrum to yield positive long-term impacts for people connecting through them is a design challenge. We engage this with the Wheel of Plush co-design toolkit. It enables 8x8 different sensor-actuator combinations in plush for co-designers to explore multimodal interactions for smart soft toy pairs connected over distance. We detail our design process and offer insights on designing a toolkit that combines artisanal plush material with simple sensors and actuators. With the Wheel of Plush, we contribute a toolkit for exploring smart soft toy materiality, data-frugal multimodal interaction, and opportunities for smart soft toy pair co-design.

An ongoing mystery of HCI is how do well-intentioned designers consistently enable products with unintentionally evil consequences. Using “questionable values” as a lens, we retell and analyze four design scenarios for smart homes that were created by participants with an IoT toolkit we designed. The selected design scenarios reveal practices that violate principles of responsible smart home design. Through our analysis we show (1) how participants explore sensor-driven objectification of the home then leverage data for surveillance, nudging, and control over others; (2) how the dominant technosolutionist narratives of efficiency and productivity ground such questionable values; (3) and how the materiality of mass-produced sensors pre-mediates questionable design scenarios. We discuss how to attend to and utilize questionable values in design: Making space for questionable values will empower design researchers to better “look around corners”, anticipating tomorrow's concerns and forestalling the worst of their harms.

Co-design methods and toolkits are commonly used to involve people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines in design processes, promoting collaboration, design thinking, shared decision making, and creativity. These methods and toolkits are generally tailored to in-person workshops supported by different physical artifacts (e.g. card-sets) in a shared physical location. Physical co-location and artifacts allow participants to interact in seamless ways, relying on everyday modalities of interaction. The CoViD-19 pandemic has forced many of such workshops online. This required transforming location, methods, toolkits and to rethink interaction among participants. With this workshop we aim to look back at these experiences of transformation and to reflect on the affordances of the physical and the virtual in co-design workshops. What are the challenges of transforming location, methods, and toolkits that are designed for in-person workshops into the digital? In which ways can in-person and virtual workshops co-exist and complement each other? We invite participants to share their experiences and reflect on how to bring together virtual and in-person co-design workshops.

Simple smart home sensors, e.g. for temperature or light, increasingly collect seemingly inconspicuous data. Prior work has shown that human sensemaking of such sensor data can reveal domestic activities. Such sensemaking presents an opportunity to empower people to understand the implications of simple smart home sensors. To investigate, we developed and field-tested the Guess the Data method, which enabled people to use and make sense of live data from their homes and to collectively interpret and reflect on anonymized data from the homes in our study. Our findings show how participants reconstruct behavior, both individually and collectively, expose the sensitive personal data of others, and use sensor data as evidence and for lateral surveillance within the household. We discuss the potential of our method as a participatory HCI method for investigating design of the IoT and implications created by doing data work on home sensors.

We present Sensorstation, a research product to explore the effect of smart sensors and services on the communal life within a shared apartment. Sensorstation utilizes wireless sensors and a shared output device displaying a steady data stream of sensor based notifications. It was deployed on the kitchen table in a shared apartment for 19 days to enable communal residents to co-design and to co-speculate on smart sensors and services in the context of their shared apartment. We synthesize and interpret findings to illustrate how residents created positive connections between each other, while simultaneously exercising self-monitoring, control over others, and contemplating reward systems and penalties. Our work contributes to a nuanced understanding of smart technology for shared apartments. We argue that design has an obligation to consider smart technology that acknowledges boundaries and to provide negotiation spaces to configure agency.

Research on product experience has a history in investigating the sensory and emotional qualities of interacting with objects. However, this notion has not been fully expanded to the design space of co-designing smart objects. In this paper, we report on findings from a series of co-design workshops where we used the toolkit Loaded Dice in conjunction with a card set that aimed to support participants in reflecting the sensory qualities of domestic smart objects. We synthesize and interpret findings from our study to help illustrate how the workshops supported co-designers in creatively ideating concepts for emotionally valuable smart objects that better connect personal inputs with the output of smart objects. Our work contributes a case example of how a co-design approach that emphasizes situated sensory exploration can be effective in enabling co-designers to ideate concepts of idiosyncratic smart objects that closely relate to the characteristics of their domestic living situations.

Cubic shapes play an astonishing role in the design of tangible interactive devices. Due to our curiosity for this widespread design preference lasting over thirty years, we constituted a literature survey of papers, books and products since the late 1970s. Out of a corpus of fourty-seven papers, books and products that propose cubic shapes for tangible interactive devices we trace the origins of cubicle tangibles and highlight the rationale for their application. Through a comparative study, we analyze the properties of this shape for tangible interaction design and classify these along the themes of: Manipulation as Input, Placement in Space as Input, Arrangement, Multifunctionality, Randomness, Togetherness & Variations, Physical Qualities, Container, and Pedestal for Output. We propose a taxonomy for cubic shaped tangible interactive devices based on the reviewed contributions, in order to support researchers and designers in their future work of designing cubic shaped tangible interactive devices.