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Title: The Upcycled Home: Removing Barriers to Lightweight Modification of the Home's Everyday Objects
The Internet-of-things (IoT) embeds computing in everyday objects, but has largely focused on new devices while ignoring the home's many existing possessions. We present a field study with 10 American families to understand how these possessions could be included in the smart home through upcycling. We describe three patterns for how families collaborate around home responsibilities; we explore families' mental models of home that may be in tension with existing IoT systems; and we identify ways that families can more easily imagine a smart home that includes their existing possessions. These insights can help us design an upcycled approach to IoT that supports users in reconfiguring objects (and social roles as mediated by objects) in a way that is sensitive to what will be displaced, discarded, or made obsolete. Our findings inform the design of future lightweight systems for the upcycled home.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1718651
PAR ID:
10191360
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 13
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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