Tinker it now!

We were very happy to take part in Are you ready for the Internet of Things with The Council, a one-day conference in Bruxelles last month. As part of it I ran a quick 3h workshop to kick-off some thoughts around Homesense and what it means designing for smart homes. I’ll spare you the images of post-it sessions but roughly the workshop ran in the following way:

0:00 Start of workshop and round the table introduction of participants. Each one talked about what makes their home “home” and some of the problems that they’d like to see resolved in their home.

0:30 Quick post-it session where we identified and mapped out objects (according to GS1 we are surrounded by 5K objects on average), people who interacted with us at home and spaces outside of the home.

0:45 Placed in more than random teams of 2 (we were around 14 in total) we had 20-30 minutes to brainstorm a scenario that would use the technologies we’re aware of in order to tie an object, a person and another space to our own home. We had to illustrate this and fill in a sheet of paper with a quick user scenario, a short description of the product/service and what would need to happen for it to exist if it wasn’t possible right now.

1:30 Every team presented to the others and received comments.

During the last hour, we discussed the possible challenges that emerged from the scenarios, as well as identifying some guidelines and overarching principles about designing in this way for a home context. It appeared that a top down approach was problematic for different reasons. Some of these findings included:

++ Building with a closed user scenarios is difficult. In a home, there are often more than one “user” and the question “would your wife and kids use this?” often resulted in a resounding no. Maybe this points to the fact that we keep designing for people like ourselves only, which in a home environment quickly becomes inappropriate.

++ The idea of home is a flexible one. Someone feels at home because of a number of often qualitative parameters. Home is also an environment where technological intrusion is kept to a perceived minimum even if wifi, sound systems and electronic objects are everywhere. They remain usually disconnected to each other and we seem to like it that way. We demand ubiquity in our work life but not necessarily at home. This could again be related to the various actors involved in the home.

++ There is a definite need to move beyond RFID as the only sentient technology we think of with smart homes. The need to filter out information is great but no one wants to commit to handling information at home in the same way as RSS feeds or Facebook updates. Noise versus signal ratio in our homes should be reduced as much as possible.

++ The number of actors involved in sharing information generated, gathered and produced by the home is hard to manage. Privacy is seen as something of utmost importance, even if the actors themselves reveal much of themselves and their activities online and through social media. The home is a perceived black box. This relates back to a lot of security and disclosure issues that might or might not be relevant but because of a lack of “killer app”. Because of this, it seems like non-negotiable criteria for design for now.

++ Marketing the value of a connected home will be very important. People don’t understand why this should be important right now and the internet of things will eventually invade the home and not just the city.

I really enjoyed leading this workshop and the participants were really engaged and wonderful to interact with. A great source of inspiration and thoughts for this project. More to come soon on the topic hopefully.