The Role of Participation in Designing for IoT

Abstract

The widespread proliferation of the internet-of-things (IoT) has led to the shift in focus from the technology itself to the way in which technology affects the social world. Being inspired by the emerging intersection between actor network theory and co-design, this paper emphasizes the role of participation in designing IoT-based technologies by suggesting alternative ways to appropriate IoT into people's lives. It is argued that prototyping becomes crucial for designing IoT-based technologies where the invisible aspects of "agency" and "autonomy" are highlighted while still drawing on its full capabilities. In that, the value of tinkering and exploration are seen as ways to experiment with and constitute one's subjectivities in relation to IoT-based technologies. Taking these points into consideration, it is suggested that there is a need to move towards a cosmopolitics of design where aesthetics and materialisation of technology also act as inquiries into issues of performance and social meaning-making.

Fostering More-than-Human Imaginaries: Introducing DIY Speculative Fabulation in Civic HCI

“…Efforts in HCI concerned with participatory IoT and the smart city, finally, have been addressing the opening up, levelling out and decentring of an all too state-and corporately closed, top-down hierarchical, and human-, engineering-and technology-centred vision of the smart city and its constituents [2,3,16,35,56]. Many researchers in HCI have thus moved away from "the established hegemony of the engineering and technology-centric epistemology" [36,1] "towards a cosmopolitics of design where aesthetics and materialization of technology also act as an inquiry into issues of performance and social meaning-making" [51,2].…”