Introduction

In this section an overview of the design case is presented. A brief introduction to the used concepts and definitions are provided, as well as some of the design tools that were used in this project.

Connecting Rich Interaction in Growing Systems (CRIGS)

The main goal of the projects within the CRIGS squad is to explore new alternatives and develop systems of connected products that would be viable in the future. These products should conform to the framework of Rich Interaction (Frens, 2006) and together form a network of products that can grow as functionality and number of products increases. Additionally, introduction of new products to the system should allow for emergent functionality, meaning that a product on itself could increase its own value, or the value of another, by combining the functionalities. These notions should be taken into account when designing since they would recur during the design case.

Design Case

Each group focuses on designing for a specific experience for a family home. The main goal of this project is to design for the experience of organizing and synchronizing activities within and around the house. The focus of this design case is to design a family of products that will help the users plan activities. For this assignment a user group was defined in the start of the assignment referred to as mundane characters. Furthermore a series of tools were introduced to facilitate the design process of these products mainly the IoT Sandbox and an IoT platform called OOCSI.

Mundane Characters

The user group was defined in a design exercise similarly to “Interaction relabelling and extreme characters” (Djajadiningrat et al., 2000). In contrast to the characters of this article, the characters of this design case are mundane people. They have stereotypical features, however also have detailed attributes that make them unique. As a result of this exercise the family Chabot was created. It is composed by fictitious characters that have unique characteristics. It is a regular family composed of a husband (Pierre), wife (Bente), two daughters (Cecile and Charlotte), one grandparent (Morten) and the family pet (Coco). Some people that frequent regularly are the neighbor (Kees-Jan de Jager), Morten’s new partner (Daisy Miller) and finally a student that helps with the cleaning of the house (Peter de Wit). These characters by no means are personas or based on user statistics, however the designs would accomodate to the needs of some of these users. See Appendix A for a full overview on the characters’ traits.

The IoT Sandbox

The IoT Sandbox is a design tool in which it is possible to explore the functionality of products in a more tangible way (Frens et al., 2018). The scale model consists of multiple rooms and it is the home of the Chabot family, which means that each family member has its own room and there are also common areas. The purpose of this design tool is to explore interactions between products in the same IoT environment. This model was also used to demonstrate the products interaction with one another using some existing sensors and actuators that can be integrated in the model.

Technical platform (OOCSI)

The digital platform used to connect the designs in the IoT Sandbox is called OOCSI. This system is able to send and receive values and data streams from one client to others which also makes wireless communication between multiple devices possible (Funk, 2013). This is how the information of the different sensors on the IoT Sandbox were transformed into usable data for actuators and other devices to work. For more information you can visit the GitHub repository at https:// github.com/iddi/oocsi.

Fig.1: The IoT Sandbox