In the futurehomestories project, participants work with researchers to design individual, alternative and innovative scenarios for the home of the future based on their personal life experiences, wishes and needs.
How can people use co-creation methods to tell stories about how they would like to live with technology in their homes in the future?
In order to be able to answer this question, we would like to invite people from the population to co-creation workshops so that they can actively contribute their ideas on how they want to live in the so-called smart home. Their active participation enables us to better understand the home as a place of application for new technologies. A case will be designed for the workshops that will build on existing methods and tools. This case will be sent to participants or used in workshops. The material contained in the case gives the participants the opportunity to express their personal ideas.
The results, for example in the form of stories, are documented in form of a book of alternative futures (zine) and will be accessible to the public and specialists. In perspective, the goal of futurehomestories is to make the tried and tested co-creation methods available on a sustainable basis. For this purpose, the methods and tools contained in the case are compared and analyzed by the researchers and later prepared for context-independent use.
The futurehomestories project is part of the network for integrated research. The overarching goal of this is the conception, implementation and establishment of integrated research, with the aim of achieving a comprehensive research concept for integrated research.
Futurehomestories deals critically with various aspects of integrated research and strives for transdisciplinary adaptation, implementation, reflection and the transfer of co-creation methodologies. For this it is important to establish ethical, legal and social aspects in the co-creation process and its reflection. Overall, the aim is to further advance integrated research.
The project is divided into four successive phases and two work areas that extend over the entire duration of the project.
Phase 1: Preparing the project.
Phase 2: Conception and implementation of the co-design workshops.
Phase 3: Revision of the concept and renewed implementation of workshops.
Phase 4: Follow-up of the findings from the previous phases and knowledge transfer in science and society.
Process-accompanying phases
Communication and cooperation between researchers from different disciplines should be ensured for the entire duration of the project. Furthermore, a continuous exchange with the general public and the specialist audience should take place.
Reflecting on and shaping human-technology relationships in a transdisciplinary way
Integrated research - what does this mean for the actors and the structures of research? And what conditions do researchers need in order to be able to consistently implement the idea of integrated research? For almost three years, the two sub-clusters 1 and 2 of the Integrated Research Cluster have been investigating the individual questions on this topic. On January 31 and February 1, 2024, they presented their preliminary results at the 4th symposium on Integrated Research: "Reflecting on and shaping human-technology relationships in a transdisciplinary way". The third sub-cluster, which has just been launched, also introduced itself and gave an outlook on the direction of its projects."
Workshop - On a sustained dissemination and sharing of co-design methods
Chemnitz 24.11.23 9.00-10.30 Uhr
Haupt, B., Becker, A., Pentzold, C. and Berger, A.
Immense efforts have been undertaken to increase citizen participation in science, which is reflected in the multitude of existing collaborative approaches. This issue has been pointed out specifically in regard to creative approaches: “Design methods are like toothbrushes. Everyone uses them, but no one likes to use someone else’s” (John Zimmermann as cited in Harrison & Tatar, 2011). Not much has changed since this critique – a lot of new co-design methods have been created with little dissemination.
Even when only considering collaborative inquiries regarding the smart home, admittedly only a small part of the IoT development, there are numerous approaches: collaborative ethnography (Lee & Šabanović, 2013), design drama (Coughlan et al., 2014), design fiction probe (Schulte et al. 2016), empathy workshop (Ghajargar et al., 2017), co-design fiction (Søndergaard & Hansen, 2018), bespoke booklets (Desjardins et al., 2019), deep hanging out sessions (Odom et al., 2019), design fiction probe (Noortman et al., 2019), speculative futures workshops (Kozubaev et al., 2019), un-kit (Ambe et al., 2019), story completion (Cambre et al., 2020), data epics (Desjardins & Biggs, 2021), data slots (https://dataslots.org/). This panoply of ventures illustrates the enormous range of methods.
In our contribution, we attempt to counteract this trend toward ad-hoc and idiosyncratic proposals that have little effect beyond single research units and teams. Rather than coming up with the next new method, we aim to show that by adapting existing methods and building on each other's approaches, there is no need to follow the apparent necessity of inventing new methods for new projects. Instead, the focus is on sustainability and re-use. In this workshop we will demonstrate the result of our adaptation processes of the IoT Service Kit (https://iotservicekit.com/).
There, we concentrated on narrative aspects of future scenarios but kept the core concept of the original tool so as to enable participants to explain their imaginaries. The adapted toolkit consists of tiles to create a floorplan, cards to represent technologies like sensors or actuators, and tokens to represent actors. The storytelling and creation of scenarios unfolds in a process of speculation.
In the first part of the workshop, participants will explore the adapted method in small groups. By letting them experience this version, we aim to show how an adaptation can make use of an original method and can help to explore its scope and possibilities.
In the second part of the workshop, we will challenge the question set down in the CfP How co-design approaches can be shared and disseminated in an accessible and sustained manner? We plan for an open discussion on the following aspects:
- accessibility and availability in light of small numbers or prototype states of many tools,
- lack of documentation for a lot of methods regarding facilitation despite its crucial role for the success of workshops,
- challenges of defining mandatory elements of tools and methods due to their various materialities,
- sharing methods not as copy but adaptation for one's own research – like Mattelmäki (2005) or Lucero et al. (2007) already pointed out in regard to the Cultural Probes approach (see Gaver et al., 1999).
The workshop will anchor this discussion. We will map the results to identify challenges and possible solutions for sharing approaches in an accessible way. The mapping will be distributed among participants. The workshop will be held in german.
You can find further Information here.
References
Ambe, A. H., Brereton, M., Soro, A., Chai, M. Z., Buys, L., & Roe, P. (2019). Older People Inventing their Personal Internet of Things with the IoT Un-Kit Experience. CHI ’19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300552
Cambre, J., Reig, S., Kravitz, Q., & Kulkarni, C. (2020). “All Rise for the AI Director”: Eliciting Possible Futures of Voice Technology through Story Completion. DIS ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 2051–2064. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395479
Coughlan, T., Brown, M., McAuley, D., Baurley, S., Tsai, A., Koppe, T., Elliott, M., Green, S., Martin, J., & Lawson, G. (2014). Living with the user: Design drama for dementia care through responsive scripted experiences in the home. UbiComp ’14 Adjunct: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct Publication, 35–38. https://doi.org/10.1145/2638728.2638750
Data Slots. (n.d.). [Educational Gaming Website]. Data Slots. Retrieved June 28, 2023, from https://data-slots.web.app
Desjardins, A., & Biggs, H. R. (2021). Data Epics: Embarking on Literary Journeys of Home Internet of Things Data. CHI ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445241
Desjardins, A., Key, C., Biggs, H. R., & Aschenbeck, K. (2019). Bespoke Booklets: A Method for Situated Co-Speculation. DIS ’19: Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 697–709. https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322311
Gaver, B., Dunne, T., & Pacenti, E. (1999). Design: Cultural probes. Interactions, 6(1), 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/291224.291235
Ghajargar, M., Longo, L., Gargiulo, E., & Giannantonio, R. (2017). Empathy Workshop: When Project team and Pilot Users Exchange Experiences. The Design Journal, 20(sup1), 3837–3848. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352887
Harrison, S., & Tatar, D. (2011). On methods. Interactions, 18(2), 10–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/1925820.1925823
IoT Service Kit. (n.d.). [Landingpage]. IoT Service Kit. Retrieved June 28, 2023, from https://iotservicekit.com/
Kozubaev, S., Rochaix, F., DiSalvo, C., & Le Dantec, C. A. (2019). Spaces and Traces: Implications of Smart Technology in Public Housing. CHI ’19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300669
Lee, H. R., & Šabanović, S. (2013). Weiser’s dream in the Korean home: Collaborative study of domestic roles, relationships, and ideal technologies. UbiComp ’13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 637–646. https://doi.org/10.1145/2493432.2493499
Lucero, A., Lashina, T., Diederiks, E., & Mattelmäki, T. (2007). How probes inform and influence the design process. DPPI ’07: Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1145/1314161.1314195
Mattelmäki, T. (2005). Applying probes – from inspirational notes to collaborative insights. CoDesign, 1(2), 83–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/15719880500135821
Noortman, R., Schulte, B. F., Marshall, P., Bakker, S., & Cox, A. L. (2019). HawkEye—Deploying a Design Fiction Probe. CHI ’19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300652
Odom, W., Anand, S., Oogjes, D., & Shin, J. (2019). Diversifying the Domestic: A Design Inquiry into Collective and Mobile Living. DIS ’19: Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 1377–1390. https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3323687
Schulte, B. F., Marshall, P., & Cox, A. L. (2016). Homes For Life: A Design Fiction Probe. NordiCHI ’16: Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/2971485.2993925
Søndergaard, M. L. J., & Hansen, L. K. (2018). Intimate Futures: Staying with the Trouble of Digital Personal Assistants through Design Fiction. DIS ’18: Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 869–880. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196766
Background
Current smart home innovations often advertise solutions for comfort, security, and efficiency [Li21], [LPH21], [Mc23]. The underlying image of the inhabitants of such homes is very limited and they are often portrayed as a family living in a detached house [De19], [Mc23]. By treating smart home inhabitants only as users and consumers we perpetuate the underlying heteronormative and capitalist values already inscribed in prevailing smart home visions [Be22]. In doing so, the actual needs and wishes of people as well as the personal idiosyncrasies of homes are not reflected in smart home technologies. But how can future smart homes be envisioned and materialized so as to consider alternative forms of living as well as the individual needs of people in their home?
In recent years HCI and design researchers have developed a multitude of approaches and methods in attempting to broaden the view and gain a deeper understanding of how to move beyond narrow marked driven smart home schemes [DWO15], [LPH21], [SAO19]. These approaches draw on collaborative creative processes [SS14] with the aim to create new technological setups for what they consider alternative homes.
In this workshop, we will build on the approaches of speculative design and co-design ventures [LC15], [SS08] as well as on work of human-computer interaction and research-through-design. The twist of this workshop however is, rather than demonstrating a newly developed method of co-creatively addressing the aforementioned issues regarding smart home visions, we adapt existing co-design methods and shift the focus to a narrative perspective which enables participants to speculate and tell stories about their individual visions of future smart home technologies.
By scaffolding a storytelling process participants are empowered to concretize their imaginaries and detail the diegetic contexts in which speculative technologies can be used without flattening the rich field of possible future modes of IoT-enhanced dwelling [Be22]. Furthermore, by demonstrating our narrative adaptations of co-design approaches we want to show the versatility such methods can yield if they are appropriated and tweaked for a certain research interest.
Aim of the Workshop
In the workshop, we challenge conceptions of home. By sharing and reflecting individual perspectives, we attempt to uncover the underlying assumptions in order to gain new insights and further develop everyone's individual concept of home.
The workshop will address the following questions a) What/where is home? b) What is a standard home? c) What is an alternative home? d) What makes home home? e) How can we imagine and narrate future homes? f) How can alternative imaginaries of smart homes be materialized? g) What roles does/can technology play in the home? h) What makes the smart home ‘smart’? i) What does this implicate for the interactions with technologies in the home?
To think beyond contemporary imaginaries of smart home technologies, three co-design tools and methods will be provided. Participants have the opportunity to explore and try out two of the methods and speculate on their future homes in a playful manner. The tools enable the participants to express their wishes and needs regarding how they want to live with technology in a home of the future. The methodical scaffolding supports participants in imagining and exploring smart home scenarios in novel ways to create stories about the speculative everyday life in them.
In detail, the three tools that will be available in the workshop are: LittleBoxes – a cultural probe variation with which participants can configure a speculative future by using inspirational and technological materials [GDP99]. The Tiles Iot Inventor Toolkit adaptation which enables people to tell detailed stories of how to possibly live with technology in the future [MGD17], [Pl23]. With the Iot Service Kit adaption participants are able to build speculative home scenarios and playfully explore imaginary future technologies within them [Io23].
Schedule of Workshop
The workshop will be held in-person on Friday, 29.09.23, 10 am to 5 pm. The workshop will be in German, as are all the tools and methods.
- Morning 10 am to 11 am
- Welcome and introduction to the workshop, hosts & participants
- Brief and general overview on co-design methods and toolkits for the IoT
- Brainstorming about the concept of the home, guided by four questions
- Coffeebreak 11 am to 11.30 am
- Noon 11.30 am to 12.30 am
- Participants will be split in small groups
- First round of try-outs with one of the tools and methods
- Participants can choose between an adaption of The Tiles IoT Inventor Toolkit, an adaption of the IoT Service Kit and a cultural probe called LittleBoxes
- Each method will be facilitated by one of the hosts
- Lunchbreak 12.30 am to 2 pm
- Afternoon 2 pm to 3.30 pm
- Participants will be split in small groups
- Second round of try-outs with one of the tools and methods
- Participants can choose between an adaption of The Tiles IoT Inventor Toolkit, an adaption of the IoT Service Kit and a cultural probe called LittleBoxes
- Each method will be facilitated by one of the hosts
- Coffeebreak 3.30 pm to 4.30 pm
- Reflection & Wrap Up 4.30 pm to 5 pm
- We encourage participants to reflect with us about their experiences of the workshop & to connect with each other beyond the workshop
References & Post-Workshop Plans
During the workshop the process will be audio recorded and photographed. The results will be documented on post-its and canvas as well as on photos. The photographed results will be shared with the workshop participants. A data privacy statement will be provided as well as a table to fill in the email address if the participant would like to receive the documentation of the workshop.
[Be22] Becker, A.; Haupt, B.; Berger, A.; Pentzold, C.: Future home stories: participatory predicaments and methodological scaffolding in narrative speculation on alternative domestic lives, Digital Creativity, 2022. doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2022.2082488
[De19] Desjardins, A.; Viny, J.; Key, C.; Johnston, N.: Alternative Avenues for IoT: Designing with Non-Stereotypical Homes. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pp. 1-13, 2019. doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300581
[DWO15] Desjardins, A.; Wakkary, R.; Odom, W.: Investigating Genres and Perspectives in HCI Research on the Home. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 3073-3082, 2015. doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702540
[GDP99] Gaver, B.; Dunne, T.; Pacenti, E.: Design: Cultural probes. interactions 6/1, pp. 21-29, 1999. doi.org/10.1145/291224.291235
[Io23] IoT Service Kit, Creating IoT Services has never been easier, iotservicekit.com accessed 22/02/2023.
[LC15] Lindley, J.; Coulton, P.: Back to the Future: 10 Years of Design Fiction. Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference, pp. 210-211, 2015. doi.org/10.1145/2783446.2783592
[Li21] Li, W.; Yigitcanlar, T.; Erol. I.; Liu, A.: Motivations, Barriers and Risks of Smart Home Adoption: From Systematic Literature Review to Conceptual Framework. Energy Research & Social Science 80, 2021. doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102211
[LPH21] Lupton, D.; Pink,S.; Horst, H.: Living in, With and Beyond the ‘Smart Home’. Convergence 27/5, pp. 1147–1154, 2021. doi:10.17/13548565211052736
[Mc23] McKinsey & Company, The Connected Smart Home Market, www.mckinsey.com/spcontent/connected_homes/pdf/mckinsey_connectedhome.pdf, accessed 22/02/23
[MGD17] Mora, S.; Gianni, F.; Divitini, M.: Tiles: A Card-based Ideation Toolkit for the Internet of Things. Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '17), pp. 587-598, 2017. doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064699
[Pl23] Play with Tiles IoT Inventor Toolkit. Change the world!, www.tilestoolkit.io accessed 22/02/2023
[SAO19] Shin, J.; Aceves Sepúlveda, G.; Odom, W.: Collective Wisdom: Inquiring Into Collective Homes as a Site for HCI Design. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing systems, pp. 1-14, 2019. doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300546
[SS08] Sanders, E. B.-N.; Stappers, P. J.: Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign, 4/1, pp. 5-18, 2008. doi.org/10.1080/15710880701875068
[SS14] Sanders, E. B.-N.; Stappers, P. J.: Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning, CoDesign, 10/1, pp. 5-14, 2014. doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.888183
Contact
Alexa Becker: alexa.becker(at)uni-leipzig.de
Benedikt Haupt: benedikt.haupt(at)uni-leipzig.de
Conference on Integrated Research on 28.02. and 01.03.2023 at the Technoseum Mannheim
We cordially invite all colleagues to the conference "Digitalized lifeworlds and integrative technology development", which is organized by the BMBF Cluster Integrated Research. The cluster researches ethical, legal and social aspects in technology development. The subsequent evening event "Pick your Scientist" is open to the public.
The ESTER and futurehomestories projects are co-hosting a two-day workshop at the INSIST 2022 conference on Oct. 6-7, 2022.
On the first workshop day, participants will imagine and speculate about the home of the future. For this purpose, the adaptation of the co-design tool "Tiles IoT Inventor Toolkit" developed by futurehomestories will be used, which enables collaborative ideation. Based on the stories imagined by the participants about speculative and highly idiosyncratic smart homes of the future, the implications contained in the designs will then be jointly reflected upon. For this purpose, an extension of the co-design tool originating from the ESTER project will be used.
The second day of the workshop will focus on science communication. Central questions here included: To whom are the results of such collaborative creative processes communicated? In what form does the communication take place? Where, when, and with what goal and benefit is it communicated?
As part of the State Student Academy on 20.7.2022 in Köthen at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, futurehomestories is conducting a co-design workshop with students. The adaptation of the "Tiles IoT Inventor Toolkit" developed in the project will be applied here. In addition, the background of participatory co-design methods will be conveyed. In two small groups the students explore the tool and design different ideas and scenarios about living with technology in speculative future smart homes.
Under the direction of futurehomestories, a participatory workshop will take place on 1.6.2022 at the city laboratory MitmachX in Chemnitz. Together with senior citizens, they will speculate on possible stories about the home of the future. The basis for this co-design workshop is the adaptation of the "Tiles IoT Inventor Toolkit" developed in the project, which supports the seniors in expressing their wishes and ideas.
In the spirit of interdisciplinary competence building, the projects RechTech and futurehomestories are organizing a workshop on the topic: What can law and design learn from each other? This workshop will take place online on 15.03.2022 due to the pandemic. Scientists from the fields of law, design and other disciplines will speculate together about a smartwatch for a policewoman. Especially the contained implications as well as resulting consequences represent a central aspect of the collaborative reflection. The workshop promotes interdisciplinary exchange and leads to stronger networking and integration of the subcluster projects of the Integrated Research Cluster.
Workshop 6. Social Design Modes
Diversifying Approaches to Co-Designing the Smart Everyday (15:00-21:00 Hong Kong)
- Aim: Explores the goals and values of co-design tools for domestic smart objects and services from a non-Western perspective.
- Organisers: Alexa Becker, Benedikt Haupt, Christian Pentzold, Arne Berger, Albrecht Kurze, Dries De Roeck, Jesse Josua Benjamin, Simone Mora, Michael B. Heidt
- Contact Organiser: Arne Berger
- Brief: The workshop is split into three parts. In the first part, there will be a short presentation on co-design methods and toolkits for the IoT. Furthermore participants will collect and unpack individual and cultural assumptions, values, and goals of “the home” and its relation to the “smart everyday.” In the second part, the participants will try out two co-design methods and toolkits to ideate a novel object or service for domestic use. The process will be facilitated by the hosts. Lastly participants and hosts will document and reflect on the designed objects and services.
More information will be available closer to the event.
Co-Designing for the Smart Home - Research Module Digital Media and Networked Communication Practices II
The seminar focuses on the exploration of creative methods for co-designing digital technologies. At their core, these new methods are about fostering creativity and enabling participation in the innovation of digital technologies. The seminar focuses specifically on the smart home, where a variety of technologies are used to support domestic activities and personal life. First, existing concepts of the smart home are discussed and critically reflected upon, and an understanding of participatory design methods is developed. Students explore the tools and use them practically in their own research project to survey them. In this project phase, students conduct their own co-design workshops in the context of the smart home.
Futurehomestories is a joint project of the Institute for Communication and Media Studies (IfKMW) at the University of Leipzig and the Department of Computer Science and Languages at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences (Koethen). The futurehomestories project is part of the network for integrated research.
Network coordinator
Prof. Dr. Arne Berger
Fachbereich 5 - Informatik und Sprachen an der Hochschule Anhalt
Lohmannstraße 23
06366 Koethen
Phone: +49 (0) 3496 67 3136
Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the High-Tech Strategy 2025