The Compass Concept

Taking simplicity a step further, the second iteration was based on the concept of moving people around within the house by guiding them to “events” using a personal “compass”. The framing for this perspective on the design task was to create “a happy home” defined as a clean and tidy home occupied by a family with a strong family bond.

Framing the problem this way quickly led to two different approaches of moving people around the house. Either by placing no emphasis on planning or creating an engaging way of doing so. Both concepts were based on a personal device able to track its own location within and around the house. Orange lights on a circular LED ring were used to “point” in directions of the other devices, indicating social activities. A blue light indicated a “chore”, meaning that an IoT-enabled device in the home needed servicing e.g. the washing machine (Figure 8). The system does not distinguish between family members and calls out all users to that they can take care of chores together.

Research showed that a strong family bond correlates with the amount of time family members spend together (Fine, 1989). This inspired the inclusion of a motivational element by conceptualizing the strength of the family bond as a visible “level of charge” in the device. This charge would increase when the family members - and their devices - were together and vice versa. One idea was to have lights inside the device to represent this level. Placing the devices in the vicinity of each other would visibly replenish the charge, increasing the strength of the light.

The two variants were named “the radar” and “the planner”. What set them apart was that “the radar” challenged the necessity for planning within a family, by removing this aspect entirely. It was replaced with the ability to view the location of present family members in the home in real time. The idea was to remind the individual of the opportunities for social interaction that exist within the home. “The planner” on the other hand could only point to social events if they had been previously agreed upon, but it reduced the number of parameters to “involved family members” and “day of event”. To input an event in the system, one device was used to choose a day after which this device would light up in orange. If the device was then “bumped” with another device, this device would also light up signifying a synchronization in the form of a “digital handshake” (Figure 9). On the day of the event, the LED ring would turn on orange lights, pointing in the direction of the other family members that were included in the event. To see a comparison between core features of two approaches please refer to Appendix D. Fig.8: Guiding compass

Fig.9: Bumping and synchronizing