No abstract

No abstract

This paper presents the main results of a three-year long field and design study of proactive information technology in the home. This technology uses sensors to track human activities in order to proactively anticipate the direction of human activity. With it, it could be possible to build an environment without buttons and remote controls. However, the home represents a series of design challenges for proactive technology. This paper describes how we have identified suitable areas for proactive designs with user research, how we built several "minidesigns" and experience prototypes, and how we tested them in a series of five field studies in the Tampere and Helsinki regions in Finland. The paper ends with a section in which we outline some of the main design principles learned in these studies, and point directions for studies in the future.

Abstract:An overall goal of the Morphome project is to create design principles for domestic applications of proactive computing in a way that could support existing values of domestic life. During the first year of the project we studied meanings and understandings associated with domestic technologies and their roles in everyday life by applying the probes approach. The focus was on the material environment of the home as well as the social: important things and practices affecting cosiness, domestication of media technologies, and use routines of different kind of domestic devices. One purpose of the project is also to explore how emphatic design methods can be applied to produce understanding of people's emotional relation to their domestic environment and dynamic use contexts of domestic media and technologies. The starting point was that proactive solutions applied in the homes have to meet high standards in aesthetic and social usability in order to become widely adopted and accepted by the people.