A perspective on multi-user interaction design based on an understanding of domestic lighting conflicts

Abstract

More and more connected systems are entering the social and shared home environment. Interaction with these systems is often rather individual and based on personal preferences, leading to conflicts in multi-user situations. In this paper, we aim to develop a perspective on how to design for multi-user interaction with connected lighting systems, based on a better understanding of reallife interpersonal lighting conflicts. In order to understand everyday lighting conflicts, including their causes and resolution strategies, we present two studies. First, we observe real-life lighting conflicts between couples living in single-room apartments. Using probes for data gathering followed by dyadic interviews, we identify the role of agreements on use in conflicts and we identify different types of conflicts (preference, activity, and attitude conflicts). Next, we take a more disruptive approach based on technology probes, where we provoke lighting conflicts in family living rooms to observe resolution strategies. We find that people try to avoid conflicts at all costs. If there is a risk that others are negatively affected by an adjustment, people rather not interact with the system at all. Based on these insights, we defined a perspective on designing for multi-user interaction that provides the user with the confidence that interactions are socially accepted. This assurance can be given by presenting the user with information leading to awareness about the acceptance of a lighting change by the other users. We advise on what information can be visualized, based on the three conflict types we observed in the study. The combination of a deeper understanding of conflicts and a perspective on multi-user interface design can serve as a starting point to design better multi-user interfaces for domestic connected systems.

Share and Share Alike?

“…Despite these large research efforts, designing for awareness is not common in interaction design for other systems than those aimed at (work-related) collaboration or that have awareness as their sole purpose (e.g., [27,40,43]). This is surprising because the importance of sharing information to coordinate actions in everyday life has been stressed by many (e.g., [7,14,51,58,61]). For example, Taylor et al [61] claim that it is the people that make their environments (socially) intelligent by manipulating the physical world into arrangements that embed social information.…”

“…These three types are common in awareness information taxonomies (e.g., [25,46]). Furthermore, intention and preference correspond to known causes of lighting conflict (resulting from a difference in activity or preference [51]) and authorship is known to increase accountability [35]. The interfaces varied in distribution over space and interaction modality to come to three commonly-used interaction styles (an application, a remote control, and a tangible interface).…”

“…Participants (n=31, f=11) were recruited during the introduction of an educational project about lighting interaction design. This involvement in the project made that the participants became sensitized, which is known to be helpful when studying lighting use because people can find it difficult to talk about lighting [41,51,54]. Participation in the study was voluntary and in no way part of the educational project, and the primary researchers had no role in the assessment of students.…”

Evaluating Interface Characteristics for Shared Lighting Systems in the Office Environment

“…Making socially salient information visible in order to make people aware of each other's needs, wishes, and motivations, resulting in accountability over an interaction; is known as social translucence [16]. We have previously emphasized the Spaces & Surfaces DIS 2017, June 10-14, 2017, Edinburgh, UK importance of social translucence in interfaces for shared systems [29,30], and we have presented first ideas on how this information could be presented in lighting interfaces [29,45]. But the relevance of the type of social information is yet unknown.…”

“…Also, usually not everyone has access to the application or network connection; e.g., [29]). Moreover, mobile phones offer highly personalized interaction styles -often based on personal preferences and presets -while the resulting light setting is likely to influence multiple people that share the lighting output [29,30]. In research, an array of alternative lighting interfaces has been proposed (e.g., [1,4,9,18,24,29,40]) but they have rarely been evaluated in use.…”