About near-future SF

Back in the days, Regine's blog "We Make Money Not Art" was still called "near near future", a name I was really fascinated of, as it implied how the short term is on the verge of going something different, more curious with intriguing alternatives. The near future laboratory's rationale of course emerged partly from that logic. Recently, sci-fi writer Charles Stross posted a interesting text about what he means by "near future SF". His text is coincidentally very relevant to my fascination towards "near (near) future" design and foresight. Stross basically shows how "Near future SF is about how-to-get-there-from-here". See some excerpts I found relevant:

"near-future SF isn't SF set n years in the future. Rather, it's SF that connects to the reader's life: SF about times we, personally, can conceive of living through (barring illness or old age). It's SF that delivers a powerful message — this is where you are going. As such, it's almost the diametric opposite of a utopian work; utopias are an unattainable perfection, but good near-future SF strive for realism.

Orwell's 1984 wasn't written as near-future SF, even though he wrote it in 1948, a mere 36 years out: it explicitly posits a global dislocation, a nuclear war and a total upheaval, between the world inhabited by Orwell's readers and the world of Winston Smith. You can't get there from here, because it's a parable and a dystopian warning: the world of Ingsoc is not for you. In contrast, Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire is near-future SF (...) You're meant to think, "I could end up there" — that's the whole point of near-future SF."

He then distinguishes near future-SF from technothriller ("The high-tech stuff is window dressing") and the discussion in the comment section quite echoes some of the discussion we had at Design Engaged after Julian's presentation about science-fiction and design. Why do I blog this? sunday's thinking about the near near future, as well as recent discussion about this issue. Of course, this is related to my work as "near future-SF" is an interesting source of material for current design and foresight projects.

Proxemics in service design

The importance of proxemics in service design. Two examples of signage that warn people to keep a certain distance with each others in a (1) booth context (Switzerland), (2) vending machine context (France).

These signs are interesting cultural cues showing the value of space between people and things, as they reveal the do's and don'ts in terms of behavior. Service design of course needs to take this into account.

Bringing the "real" to design through user experience research

The link between user research and design is a topic I focus on even more closely than in the past, perhaps because of my involvement in different design courses. More specifically, I am interested in how user research can be relevant for design purposes and what are the underlying process one can put into place to work this out. Since I work with video game designers and interaction designers (yes I make the distinction between both but that's another story), this issue is quite important. One of the interesting term here is the notion of "the real" as user research is meant to bring material concerning the real world, what users really do, what are their constraints and needs, and in fine why they do what they do. The literature in HCI, especially about the use of ethnography, has a wide take on this but I was more curious to see what designers have to say about it. Reading User research at IDII: Three case studies, 2002-2004 by Simona Maschi, Laura Polazzi and Jay Melican, I ran across this interesting quote:

"Everything we learn from user studies has the great advantage of being “true” (although not in an absolute way), because it comes from the real world and fromreal experiences. This makes it somehow believable and graspable for our audience, both within and outside of the design team. In other words user studies provide the design team with “live material” that can be used to share thoughts and ideas and to communicate the project effectively to the world."

(The document is btw a relevant set of case study and quick description of research methods employed at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea).

This notion of the "real" as the cornerstone of the exchange between UX research and design was also interestingly tackled at the recent EPIC conference. See for example how this weblog highlight the "real issue" in the discussion about how ethnographers can build and exhibit the authority necessary to be able to sell and provide ethnographic insights:

"Simon Pulman-Jones argued, ethnographers in industry are seeking to establish themselves as an authority on The Real - what it is really like out there in order to commoditize our insights, our epiphanies to help the organisations that we work for and with. (...) Ethnographers are indeed ‘brokers of the real‘ - they have themselves attained a sort of gatekeeper role between the designers and the engineers and the real world where real people actually use the products. They help the engineers meet and understand the users, in order to change the way the engineers think and feel about them."

Why do I blog this? preparing a lecture about this issue, gathering notes and elements for heated debates. I won't enter into the debate about whether the "real" is graspable (the amount of literature about this issue is so huge that you'd better start with Plato), nor about ethnography as the solution to the world's problem (is ethnography really about describing the world?). Rather, I find interesting here is the increasing impression that the "real" should be brought to the table in design and therefore a different set of allies (ethnographers now, ergonomists and cognitive psychologists in the past), tools (qualitative research today, quantitative research yesterday) gain momentum over time.

My personal impression here is that: (1) yes the real should be explored, analyzed and employed in the design process, (2) however the "real" is perhaps not so real for lots of reasons: the "data capture" implied by the time/budget constraints of project, the "data reduction" caused by the method (quant method = reductionism, qual method = research as the instrument), the mean of transferring the results to the design team (collaborative workshop? pdf report sent by email?), etc.

Felix Petersen on the geoweb (web2 expo berlin)

Super quick notes from Felix Petersen's talk last week at Web2.0 Expo in Berlin. Felix founded Plazes, a web-supported location-based service in 2006. He basically built upon his experience to describe the state of the geoweb in 2008 (excuse the rawness of my notes):

"founded in 2006 / one of the first start-up in this geopresence space check each others' location with your laptop that detects the wifi where you are we had to build the whole thing, now the geoweb is a more mature ecosystem and the components ar emore specialized nokia acquired plazes few months ago, now plazes is part of nokia maps; trying to mash things up

why going with nokia? if you look at my card it says "heads of social activities" my mother thinks i am organizing bbq party but it's a sign that nokia is advanced division " context-based services", expanded from LBA

the promises of geoweb: connected guidance of people (reach any place on any terrain... mass market... on foot+car), discover and share places (find and add cool places, recommend to others), record and share your life (record hikes, journeys and share or relive your life), stay close to your friends (stays close+ plan joint activities)

this promise has been around for sometimes the nokia phone from 1998 with WAP was cool and it even had a buddy-finder (vodagone germany) but it did not work, it never came out on that product broken promise, it was very naive, people seemed to haven't think lbs through

falses ideas: it's creepy that people can see where I am: i don't think so cool, i can finally track my friends wherever they are: this is wrong, it's not about tracking but about publishin great i can push an ad or coupon to anyone passing by my store: naive vision + this does not scale, this use case won't work

AND TIME WON'T HELP, it's not just about waiting the other part of the hype cycle

what it takes to build the geoweb, you need to understand that: - location detection: it's not soft, of course there is GPS enabled devices but... - mapping: layer of rules and metadata, google maps helps a lot, that's a component that is at a good stage - social objects: what are the geoweb specific objects that emerges: what are the unique objects that work with location?

1) location detection: GPS, A-GPS, wifi localisation (skyhook wireless), cell localisation, cell-triangulation (never really useful because it was confiné au seul operateur: pas possible de transmettre cette information aux amis d'un autre provider sans qu'ils aient a payer...)

what does location detection save? it can put you at a certain lat/long at a certain time does not sound like much, lat/long without context is not much but if you add existing social objects, location can add valuable information: geotagging pictures, twibble other objects: email, music tracks? what other objects can improve through location? sorting/filtering your email by location? this is where things will happen

there are still challenged: battery life: and it needs to be aware all the time... probing frequency privacy scheme needed pattern detection background processes: it's not possible to build an app that track my position in the background for other applications

there is a tendency to build gps in every devices (camera, bike) but interestingly there are also tracker that does uniquely tracking: little sony gps box

2) Mapping provides context and rules lots of improvement in that field enables routing and navigation personal nav is already mass market today mapping will constantly improve: google cars that collect streetview imagery, 3d models...

3) Social objects a social network is not only a connection between people, social connections happens through social object examples of social objects: bookmarks, people, pictures... web2.0 is the web of social objects

a social object: represents atomical data (i can refer to it, it becomes a conversational piece: like a picture on flickr), has a perman-linkable/embedable, often provides a conversational canva

you can add location to other social objects and sort them so which new social objects emerge in the geoweb? 1) places (a point in space): the most important, places are the most reference points of the geoweb the challenge: name space unification (how to refer to you couch as a place? your appartment? this is not just using the yellow pages, the idea is to come up with sth that is open but has a controlled vocabulary), open versus closes, dupes (we have to allow duplicates (different city names berlin) but also control them: how do you allow for ambiguity), lat/long which allows to place assignement yahoo had done it with the "where on earth" idea 2) traces: lots of points over time ideal container for attaching places and media 3) activities vast amount of data social activies are on the intersection of time and space what dopplr calls a trip is an activity

SO what can we build? 1) cool new apps: lat/long: this picture was taken here +place: three of your friends are at this bar +trace: this place I visited on my italy trip +activity: five people you will run into at Shift08

2) privacy right now: time and relation future: place-based privacy other options: chaffing, granularity

3) advertising - monetize targeting based on meaningful locations triggering upon engagement: you only get an ad if you engage physically a place, if you go there... turning advertising into information

what the ecosystem will look like? object creation (phone, laptop... automatic)...api layer... object storage (contextual logic/provacy, data layer)... api layer... object publication (published through all kinds of chanels: twitter, facebook, ovi, google earth, skype, fireagle...)"

Why do I blog this? material for my book about locative media, content for a foresight study about the future of the web.

air interaction

Browsing through weird interfaces, I ran across this air-augmented display.

It's called BYU-BYU-View and it basically adds air to the interaction between a user and a virtual environment, and communication through a network, by integrating the graphics presentation with wind inputs and outputs on a special screen:

"As a telecommunication tool, BYU-BYU-View could enable a system that presents a cutaneous sensation that distant lovers are sharing the same space. As an interface in a virtual environment, it could add the cutaneous sensation of air movement to sight and sound in a novel game. It could become a new input tool for people who have limited abilities with their hands or feet, or a communication method for deaf or blind people that delivers information directly to the skin."

Why do I blog this? wondering about non-standard interfaces and how "blow" can be an intriguing interactions for users, all of this after a long discussion with friends about "blowing" in your nintendo DS in public when playing with nintendogs.

Design approach and capturing the "needs"

In the latest issue of ACM interactions, Steve Portigal's column is a categorization of different "approaches to making stuff" that I found both insightful and ironically intriguing:

"Be a Genius and Get It Right (James Dyson): Be a Genius and Get It Wrong (Dean Kamen) Don't Ask Customers If This Is What They Want Do What Any Customer Asks Understand Needs and Design to Them"

Why do I blog this? an interesting typology of design, perhaps to exhaustive but that certainly tackle relevant issues. For example, one of my favorite is certainly the "Do What Any Customer Asks" as it is often the case with people confusing "user centered design" with "doing what users asked". This is a problem I face very regularly when describing my work: there is this idea that being user-centric is about giving users what they want/asked. Which is of course different than what they need or would desire, since there is a wide gap between what people say to do/want and what they really do/need. It definitely shows the interesting tension in design between relying on users' practice or inventing new futures. As Steve points out, the point is a feature request should be translated in a need request. He takes the example of a customer who want a handle; the important thing here is not that the person wants specifically a handle but simply a way to move the thing from one place to another, and the handle is only a solution instance. So what's a better way to get it? It's all about grasping the needs:

"Needs, as considered in this approach, can be functional, like when a design firm discovered women shoveling snow more than men and redesigned the ergonomics of a snow shovel for this typically smaller user. Needs can also be emotional, such as when Sunbeam studied the backyard-grilling process and realized that the grill itself was associated with family moments and social connectivity rather than a set of meat-cooking features. Sunbeam then worked with Continuum to design the Coleman Grill to connote nostalgic camping cookouts. Needs can deal with shifting mental models of common behaviors, too. Work by B/R/S for Colgate identified that brushing teeth is seen by people as a way to maintain their entire mouth, not just scouring the surface of the teeth. This led to Colgate Total, which promises "Superior Oral Health.""

Vocabulary of touch

Quick wordle after a discussion I had about touch with Timo last week. Each of these words can lead to ask interesting questions regarding interface affordance, vocabulary of interactions as well as how create human-legible touch interactions. Exercise: take each of these terms and a technological device (eg. an SLR), ask youself how to use each of them to support the existing features. And then wonder about the relevance of gestures and touch-interactions for such uses. What does waving a device would support? What would caressing mean in photography?

Why do I blog this? mapping some words about the vocabulary of touch for future brainstorm (and then research). Echoes a lot with a current research project about gestures.

Lift09: where did the future go?

As I already discussed here, the topic of Lift09 (25,26,27 Feb. 2009) will be "Where did the future go?":

"After three successful editions in Geneva, two events in South Korea, we are preparing for the 4th edition of Lift in Switzerland (February 25-26-27, 2009). This year, the topic will be "Where did the future go?".

We were indeed told the future would be about mechanization and computerization leading to 3D flying virtual assistants, 1984-like nightmare or Asimov-inspired robots. Most of the entertainment culture as well as scientific research have contributed to this representation of a future filled with disruptive and glossy inventions that may or may not eventually turned our world upside down.

Beyond this depiction of tomorrow, we realize nowadays the long-praised "21st century" itself may not materialize. The long-awaited videophones did not really take off in terms of user adoption, flying cars are still sci-fi and we do not yet jack direct interface into a nervous system. As some anthropologists recently claimed, it is as if we were stuck in a perpetual present, looking for the short-term.

That said, change happened but not necessarily where we though it would. Although innovation is not always shiny and visible, things as fundamental as solidarity, love, or way we inhabit our physical environment have evolved dramatically, calling for new approach to design meaningful new interactions."

Pre-early bird registration is available for few weeks here.

Pervasive games and mobile distributed group work

In their paper entitled "New uses for mobile pervasive games - Lessons learned for CSCW systems to support collaboration in vast work sites", Matthew Chalmers and Oskar Juhli discusses how such games could be of benefit to conduct research about mobile and distributed work (e.g. infrastructure management at airports and road inspection, as well as public bus transportation). From what I can tell, it's a sort of longer development on their previous workshop paper "New uses for mobile pervasive games"from the Computer Games & CSCW Workshop at ECSCW'05. They take on the analogy of space and place issues in both domains (pervasive gaming and mobile distributed group work), more especially concerning the focus on the geography both as a topic and a resource in the work. They then show how different pervasive game they worked on (Treasure, Road Rager, Backseat gaming, Castles) as well as the results from user studies can give fruitful information:

"we suggest that there are valuable lessons to be gained from research into games in which players create their forms of play subject to the rules of the game, the technology they use and the wider social and environmental situation. We see strong and useful parallels with the situation of workers who create their work within organisational rules but also within their wider technical, social and environmental setting. "

Why do I blog this? This was the approach we also adopted in CatchBob during my PhD thesis work. What I find important today is that beyond the current serious game trend, there are more and more initiatives that try to employ games as platform to do other things than playing. The paper above is an example but thing such as Superstruct, i.e. the use of ARG as a foresight tool, is another interesting sign.

Delicate cueing

How to cue the passers-by to enter this shoe shop by using a delicate socialnav-like trick. Note how intriguing it is to use this lovely shoe material on the very swiss-designed raw concrete ground. Seen in Luzern, Switzerland yesterday afternoon.

WiFi vocabulary

Continuing my exploration of internet vocabulary, the terms employed in different cultures to refer to WiFi are diverse and interesting to document (and discus with Timo). The first one is from Boston airport (but I could have shown some from other countries) and the second from Berlin. I find intriguing the use of a technical term such as "WLAN", as opposed to the more universal (and more basic) "WiFi".

The hidden value of vernacular maps

Two maps to navigate in Berlin yesterday and today. The first one, on the right, is the classic lonely-planet-like artifact you give to the hotel, asking them "can you point me where we area?". The second is the lovely and more valuable map handed by a local friend who made some recommendations. Even though most of the context (parks, other streets) is lost, there is more value to me in this second one (and it's also more foldable in my pocket).

Two different sorts of information: where the former is exhaustive and official, the latter is minimal but goes straight to the point: the place where my friend assumed I'd be intrigued. Services opportunity here.

Coincidentally, and because we passed by Berlin in the same week, near future laboratory compadre Julian Bleecker has also a post about maps.

When surface has more value than volume

A picture I took yesterday morning in Geneva. It shows an interesting (and sad) trend lately in the city: the disappearing of mom and pop's shop which are now so expensive to rent that it's more valuable for certain luxury companies to use the shop as a billboard structure. In the case depicted above, the former DIY shop on the right has been turned into a billboard for a watch company (but of course some cool graffiti-makers attacked it). The portuguese restaurant showed on the foreground (left) has also recently been turned into this kind of surface: the wooden structure will soon be covered by crappy watch ads.

In the end, we have an empty volume with this super-expensive surface.

Why do I blog this? this quick thought ("surface more valued than volume") while walking around there yesterday led me to think about how spatiality is a complex issue. It's kind of weird to think about this sort of practice.

Vodafone's receiver on space/geoweb

In the last issue of Vodafone's receiver, which is about "space", there is an interesting overview of the geospatial web (aka GeoWeb) by Sean Gorman. The article examine how these technologies allow to understand spatial and social phenomena. Starting by a quick overview of the field and how it shifted from cartographers and geo-scientists to hackers and programmers, Gorman describes the different possibilities enabled by such technologies: from mash-up to mobile application (unfortunately using again the sad restaurant-rating example).Why do I blog this? useful material to write a chapter about the history of location-based services. The article by Jonathan Raper is also pertinent as it uncovers principles about what "digital geography" can offer.

Science fiction and HCI/interaction design

Some quick pointers about the relationships between science-fiction and HCI/interaction design: Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies by Michael Schmitz surveys the different kind of interaction design sci-fi movies envisioned during the past decade. It also interestingly describes how the film technicians made prototype possible and legible.

Make It So: What Interaction Designers can Learn from Science Fiction Interfaces by Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel is a nice presentation from SxSW08 that looked at sci-fi material as well as industry future films to show design influences sci-fi and vice versa.

The upcoming paper by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell entitled "“Resistance is Futile”: Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing that investigates how ubiquitous computing is imagined and brought into alignment with science-fiction culture.

Julian Bleecker's presentation from Design Engaged and SHiFt 2008 also addressed that topic.

A list to be updated I hope.

Flea market electrogear

Seen at the flea market last week end in Geneva. It's fascinating to see how such electro-devices are more and more common in this kind of place. Electronic gear used to be common but I see a surge recently in second-hands shops. Why is that intriguing to be blogged? simply because the prominence of electronic artifacts is so important that it starts leaking into more and more places. And the fact that they're not covered with this gloomy black boxes makes it even more curious.

Designing for the mobile and fixed

Found time to sort my notes from last week's workshop. Quick and dirty revision below The first presenter, Alan Dix, nailed down the differences between designing for the mobile and fixed in his "interaction with and through the mobile" speech. He pointed out the main differences: context/device/interaction/infrastructures.

Limited: screen size (if they have screen at all), input, bandwidth, cost connectivity (still today), computational power, heterogeneous platforms BUT opportunities (sensor, camera, projector) Context: variable context (street, meeting, train), focus of interaction (short focused activity, divided attention), interruptions (by mobile devices or mobile task, opportunistic), privacy and security issues, intimacy and availability, ergonomics (movement and vibration when walking/in car, etc.)

Besides, he showed how requirements and evaluation is hard: it's not that you can't do things, it's different. It's particularly hard to do field observation: - distribution of tasks in time and space - may use diary studies - or 'transect' study (loots at people for short time), you only get snippets

And even in the lab because screen capture and device logging may need special toolkits AND it's hard to capture eye gaze etc. hard with device in the air, but holding device on table worse

Heuristics such as Nielsen's are heavily used in UI design but situation is changed with mobile. There are heuristics of mobile UI literature: see Bertini et al. (2007). Appropriating heuristic evaluation methods for mobile computing

May use screen emulator OR "kludge" hardware; what is good enough? Or have 1/2 prototypes (physical input proto but screen on computer with different levels of fidelity)

The second tutorial was by Paul Coulton who gave an insightful overview of the creative capabilities of mobile devices to support original interactions. Paul presented a wide range of interactions using touch/near field communication, the digital camera or location-based scenarios using hands-on examples. I have already blogged about this "exquisite corpse" design rationale which I found intriguing. A slide that struck me as relevant concerning the difference between mobile and fixed computing stated the following:

Opportunities: context (location, presence, sensing), connectivity, feature evolution large demographic, high device penetration, changing fashion Constraints: constrained platforms, fragmentation (difficulty to reach critical mass), porting, distribution (nobody download), low revenues (nobody wants to pay), skills shortage

Why do I blog this? even if it's very raw here (no time to blog lately), I find interesting to describe recent material concerning the difference between fixed and mobile computing.

Electrical switchgear and meters

Recently involved in a design studio concerning electricity and the internet of things at ENSCI design school in Paris, I spent some time these days nailing down the topic of people and energy from various angles: perception and representation of electricity, the importance of infrastructures, the social interactions and practices surrounding electrical objects, etc. Most of the material I employ emerges from my readings (been perusing a lot about the history of techniques and electrical devices design as well as usage lately) and the pictures I take. These pictures come both from various urban safari I make (vacation, on purpose, etc.) as well as user studies. Although I have not studied the topic of electricity per se in my field studies, doing home ethnography allowed me to scratch the surface about these issues and discuss that with informants. We had an interesting discussion today about electrical switchgear and meters. These devices are kind of spot-on of the sort of artifacts I find intriguing to examine. There is indeed a lot to draw from observing them. See for instance the following set of pictures encountered in my recent travels (US - Brazil).

Depending on the culture, switchgear and meters are not located at the same place, and not always "protected". In France for instance, both are generally located close to each other indoor, and, of course, the electrical guy needs to have an appointment with the tenant/owner to check the metering. Whereas in lots of other countries (such as northern america but also in the EU), meters are outdoor. Electrical consumption is then more public and less personal.

Moreover, switchgear are generally indoor. France, again has the habit to refer to the "compteur électrique" has a sort of umbrella term for both the meter and the switchgear (no picture here). This interface with the electrical infrastructure is also more and more complex with lots of red buttons which correspond to an odd mapping of the house/appartment structure, with generally no clear rules.

This last picture, taken last summer in Peru is also very compelling to me as it shows how peruvian house actually reveal the electrical infrastructure from the meter to other house parts with white paint. I don't have any answer for this, my two cents would be that it can be useful for security reasons. In any case, the point of taking and discussing this picture is that is allows to question the environment, find intriguing phenomena and eventually inspire design.

Readers really into that topic might want to have a look at Sliding Friction as well as Jeff Makki's Critical infrastructure walking guide.

About CCTV "impacts"

Reading this report on "the impacts of CCTV in the UK, I was struck by some points in the conclusion:

"crime rates appeared to the authors to be a poor measure of the effectiveness of CCTV. The problem about measuring outcomes in terms of overall crime rates was that they disguised some important successes with particular types of offence. Moreover, in some cases (although not many) an increase in crime was an indicator of success, and this needs carefully teasing out. Similarly, mechanisms increasing recorded crime rates can work alongside those that reducecrime, and these can cancel each other out. Recorded crime rates were subject to a great deal of background noise from other factors, such as other crime reduction initiatives in the areas being studied, regional and national crime trends, and changes in methods of crime recording, any of which could mask the small impact that CCTV might have. (...) there was a lack of realism about what could be expected from CCTV. In short, it was oversold – by successive governments – as the answer (indeed the ‘magic bullet’, Ditton and Short, 1999) to crime problems (...) there was a tendency to put up cameras and expect impressive results, ignoring the challenge of making what is quite a complex measure work (replicating the findings of Ditton et al. 1999), and failing to define what exactly the CCTV system was expected to do. (...) the installation of CCTV requires more than the production of a technically competent system; generally, project designers did reasonably well in this regard. However, systems have to be monitored properly or recordings made and stored properly; but the quality of this work varied considerably from one control room to another."

Why do I blog this? was reading this at the airport after having found the reference in a newspaper, I find interesting the arguments given above as they can also apply to lots of other ubiquitous computing projects. The expectations towards such camera-based system may interestingly apply to other sensor-based deployments. There's a lot more to draw on the report, especially regarding the humans who are in control rooms and who have trouble keeping up with the huge amount of data that is collected.

User acceptance of the smart fridge

The Internet of things field has given, for quite a long time, a prime position to the fridge as the sort of stereotypical device one could "augment". The ubiquity of this artifact, as well as its size and position, made it a good candidate to become the target of ubiquitous computing researchers. The general ideas is often to start from an existing object such as the fridge and try to project if into the future by adding displays, sensors as well as RFID technology. Giving "intelligence" to your fridge often corresponds to add new capabilities allowed by such technologies: internet browsing, fridge content scanning, automatic order over the internet to refill the fridge, etc. (picture taken from this BBC article)

Most of the time, the human aspect of such purposes is left out of the picture as if the fridge designers thought that thing would only requires time to be "accepted". This is why I was interested in Matthias Rothensee's paper entitled "User Acceptance of the Intelligent Fridge: Empirical Results from a Simulation" which he presented at the Internet of Things conference in Zürich few months ago. Although that event seemed scarily engineer/business-based, showing only one side of the coin, there were still some people there who realized that the internet of things is not just some über-cool engineer thing.

The authors employed a smart fridge simulation and a quantitative methodology to study the perception and evaluation of the various assistance functions provided by the system. The variable of interest were: the usefulness, the ease of use, the intention of use and the affective attitude. Some of the results:

"Generally, participants were neutral to positive about the smart fridge. They regarded the system as useful, easy to use, and would slightly tend to use it, if already on the market. Participants estimated their likely reactions to a smart fridge, both, before and after interacting with a simulation of it. Results have shown that despite the fact that the intention to use such a system remains stable after interacting with the simulation, usefulness and affective reactions are negatively affected by interacting with it. This reaction can be interpreted as the participants’ disappointment about the apparent dullness of the smart fridge. (...) usefulness remains the most important predictive variable for the acceptance of the smart fridge, as in traditional workplace technology acceptance literature (...) however, we learned that pleasure felt during interaction with the simulation is also a valuable predictor, underlining the importance of emotion in the acceptance of household technology (...) people’s evaluations differed between the groups, confirming the hypothesis that smart fridge functions are differently appreciated. Nutrition and healthy lifestyle feedback are evaluated most positively, whereas the recipe planer flops."

Why do I blog this? interesting elements here concerning possible users' reactions, especially when considering the low number of user studies which consider the human appreciation of intelligent fridges. However, I am dubious about the use of laboratory tests (and hence the corollary statistical tests) to analyze this kind of design issues. The role of context (spatial, social), practices and habits is very important to analyze regarding acceptance and usage of technologies since these different elements generally have direct or indirect influence on how people employ artifacts.