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Interactive installations which critique the relationship between smart products in the IoT system and human beings
June 2019 - December 2019
The Origin of This Topic
Intelligent machines make more and more decisions about what to do and complete the transactions without a middleman. Such as Amazon Echo to electricity ordered by smart thermostats. To have higher quality service, we need to consider the needs of machine “customers” come in higher stages (Atzori et al.,2010).
As the Internet of Things gradually enters our lives, more and more smart products deprive our decision-making power. How the machine interacts with the machine will lead to new thinking: how to explore the relationship between humans and machines, what kind of role that people play in the context of the Internet of Things.
I specialize in the scope of the machine to household appliances and study the interactions between people and appliances in a specific environment such as the home. Because our home includes multiple roles, people of different roles have different views on home appliances, and the methods and frequencies they use are different. And this difference is the reason why smart homes are sometimes less intelligent, because most of the current intelligence is the intelligence that everyone uses, so they are universal to a certain extent, not personalized.
Context
Consequences
Relationship
So it is important to know the context, consequences, and relationship of these products and human beings.
Home Appliance Mapping
I mapped the household appliances I used often and began thinking about the perspective and the point of view of the objects that we design for - how they understand, misunderstand, and interpret people and context.
When
Make some tea
Make some coffee
Help to cook
Relationship
Keep warm Big fan of tea;
People always talk with each other when waiting;
Save time (quicker than use pot);
Turned off the base and turned into a regular kettle.
When
When entering a room
When leaving a room
Relationship
Sometimes unconscious movements;
Actions that occur every day;
Sometimes more like a ritual.
When
Usually before attending important events
After the clothes are dried
Relationship
The hostess usually uses more;
Can't stay on clothes for a long time;
Usually used with shelves for clothing.
Speculative Design
After the whole process of using the kettle in the map, according to Dunne and Raby(2013), I broke down each step and made a speculative design of how things could be and made many storyboards which can let me think about whether the function of the smart kettle is reasonable in different situations.
I try my best to change the interaction between different kettles in various situations. I analyze the behaviors of people dealing with these scenes and think about the rationality and the problems reflecting in this process.
These storyboards can demonstrate that homes that we design for are not the perfect blank page, but a complex mix of other products, issues from the reality of a family, a forgetful user, and so forth.
In Girardin’s article (2016), “Translated to the world of data, the introduction of a new service, products, or algorithms requires a responsive design that considers moments when things begin to disappoint, embarrass, annoy, or stop working or being useful.”
In the context of the current achievable technology, I criticize the problems that arise from the fact that these intelligent forms are forced into human agents without taking into account the complexity of things.
So based on this situation there will be a lot of new and unusual behavior generated as I drew in the storyboard. And in these storyboards we can see how the relationship changes between human and smart products.
But it is not enough, I need to select and summarize these scenarios and to reflect some common problems.
The rationale for moving forward
To raise doubt and alertness, I chose three representative scenarios. Based on my research's rationale and my understanding of the current status of the development of the Internet of things, I analyzed and explained the meaning of producing them. This was decisive for my further scenario setting.
1/
For the first one, I want to demonstrate if a smart product over-intervention our life that will lead to aversion and resentment.
One of the big questions with smart home technology is, “how much of this should be user-driven versus A.I.-driven?” (Spates, 2018). As smart home appliances gain more and more autonomy, it helps the owner to issue orders by acquiring and analyzing the owner's information and data. This process of human beings slowly giving autonomy to products has led to smart products having more and more autonomous rights to intervene in our lives, which has led to a change in people's status from controlling products to being controlled by-products.
By revealing this situation, I urge people to pay attention to this trend and envisage a response. Constantly changing and facing the position of human agents can make the Internet of Things move towards a healthier and positive direction.
2/
For the second one, I want to critique the common interaction way in the IoT system.
Internet as an indispensable part of the IoT system, the first obvious networking technology candidate for an IoT device is Wi-Fi because it is so ubiquitous. Certainly, Wi-Fi can be a good solution for many applications. Almost every house that has an Internet connection has a Wi-Fi router (Micrium 2010).
Mobile phones, as the most intelligent devices around us, are the first choice of many smart home designers in the list of control devices. And this kind of direct and rude treatment is often accompanied by various problems.
Revealing these issues is a wake-up call for designers involved in the design of IoT system products, and can promote our responsible design attitude when facing problems as designers. At the same time, it also reminds the audience that they should not mindlessly follow smart products, and should use a critical attitude to carefully choose and judge them.
3/
And the third one, I would like to show the growing tensions between human agency and smart products in the IoT system.
“The Internet of Things allows people and things to be connected Anytime, Anyplace, with Anything and Anyone, ideally using Any path/network and Any service”.
Fostering and enhancing the individual ability to freely determine the values that will orient and binding interactions in the IoT is also a response to a major challenge posed by the IoT, namely its tendency to reduce human agency, awareness, and reflexivity as a consequence of the deterministic deployment of Things.
Figuring out how to treat these smart products and showing these problems in this situation is extremely important for reminding human agency to keep human features, such as the use of intentionality and awareness, freedom, control on thoughts and acts, in IoT system.
Storyboard improvement
After the whole process of using the kettle in the map, according to Dunne and Raby(2013), I broke down each step and made a speculative design of how things could be and made many storyboards which can let me think about whether the function of the smart kettle is reasonable in different situations.
Story1
This story is about the intelligent kettle that reminds the owner to boil water incongruously and leads to the host's dislike.
This story reflects on whether the smart product's tough and excessive way of intervening in life is justified, and behind this kind of intelligence is the ending that is destined to be annoying.
Story2
This story is about a remotely controlled kettle. The owner's desire to use the phone for remote water boiling is interrupted by other tasks on the phone so that he finally forgets the watering task.
This story reflects the problems brought by some smart products that want to make our lives simple and convenient, and reveals the drawbacks of some simple and straightforward IoT interaction, just like using mobile phones to control everything.
Story2
This is a kettle with supervision, and the supervisor will be the closest person to you. When the kettle detects that you are not drinking water on time, it will send a message to your kinsfolk.
This kettle reflects the tension between people and smart products. It is a transformation in the relationship between a smart product and a user when it acts as a human agent. I hope to demonstrate the negative impact of this intimate relationship on smart products and spark people's thinking: Is this way of using smart products to show concern is too straightforward, what results it may lead to and what kind of behavior will people being "concerned" generate.
When I finished drawing the storyboard, I started to do some shooting tests for the official shooting.
Making films
Before shooting, I listed the props that I need in the films and contacted actors and photographers. At the same time, I also arranged the arrangement of the items on the scene, such as how to set off the background and how to highlight my objects.
Based on every kettle’s functions, I designed three logos for them. The first one is the kettle that uses open and close lid to remind people to add water. The second one can be controlled remotely. And the third one will supervise you to drink water.
During the shooting, I have made strict adjustments to lighting, shooting angles, and shooting techniques. For example, how much need to have a lens for the environment, how to express the mental activity of the character at the moment, and so on.
At the same time, we set two positions for multi-angle shooting, hoping to show more details and information in the movie.
Making films
Story1
Story2
Story3
Making models
After perfecting the film, I began to remodel the kettle and wanted to show them at the exhibition. Because I think watching movies is an important driving force for the audience to think, but the real interaction with these kettles allows them to have a more direct feeling of these smart products, and to understand the relationship between us and these smart products is.
1/ Kettle1
For the kettle one, I want to directly restore the kettle in the movie: when the person approaches, the kettle will open and close the kettle lid slowly. When the person walks away, the frequency of opening and closing the kettle lid will be faster.
2/ Kettle 2
The second kettle in the movie has no way to present it directly in a physical way, so I converted its way of expression. Using a mobile phone to control the kettle causes the kettle to disappear in the physical space, and the frequency with the person interacts with it is getting lower and lower due to the large amount of information in the phone that may interrupt the instructions sent by the So people can usually "see" the kettle through their mobile phone, but for a variety of reasons they can't use it, and these reasons are just brought by the phone. And this concept can be achieved by AR technology.
3/ Kettle 3
The kettle 3 also directly re-enacts the kettle in the movie, and its characteristic is that when the time of drinking, the kettle will keep reminding you. When you drink the water, the kettle will say "well done". I chose the handle of the kettle as a trigger because the kettle would say "well done" only after the person gripped the handle and then picked up the kettle and poured the water.
Design work output
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