At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges

W. Keith Edwards and Rebecca GrinterUbiComp 2001

Overview

• “Smart homes” better people’s lives with increased communication, awareness, and functionality

• However, there exist technical, social, and pragmatic challenges

• Raise awareness of existing domestic technology literature

• Increase the use of situated studies

The smart home is coming

• Technology is getting there:– Moore’s Law– Everything networked and wireless– Increased vendor focus on techs for the home– Proof-of-concepts exist: Aware Home @ Ga Tech

• But there still exist some challenges!

Seven challenges

• The “accidentally” smart home• Impromptu interoperability• No systems administrator• Designing for domestic use• Social implications of aware home

technologies• Reliability• Inference in the presence of ambiguity

1: The “accidentally” smart home

• Current smart home environments are intentional (purpose-built)

• More realistic view: technology will be brought piecemeal into the home (upgrade) – The “accidentally” smart home

1: The “accidentally” smart home

• Even mundane examples, demonstrate big problems

• How do users debug their home?• Is this simply a “design” problem?

1: The “accidentally” smart home• Solution is to help users to understand the tech

– What devices can do, what they have done, and how we control?

• When designing, think of these questions:– What kinds of affordances (action possibilities, e.g., recording,

displaying) do we need to make the system intelligible? – How can I tell my device is interacting?– What are the boundaries of my smart home?– What are the potential configurations of my devices?– How can users be made aware of the entire houses’ affordances?– Where will the locus of interaction be in a system that isn’t in one place

(but sum of many parts)?– How do I control these devices and the whole system?

2: Impromptu interoperability

• Ability to interconnect with little advance planning

• A priori agreement on syntax and semantics is needed

• However, creating standards for all types of devices/services (a priori) is not feasible

• New models of interconnectivity are required

3: No systems administrator

• Can’t plausibly expect that homeowners will need to be system administrators

• How about “appliance-centric” computing (single function oriented)? Still having interoperability problems?

• Utility model: “thin-client” solution??– Open services gateway initiative– Cloud computing

• Why doesn’t plumber/electrician model work?

4: Designing for domestic use

• Learning from the telephone/autos/cell-phones– Hard to foresee how people use a tech (intention vs. actual

use)• Learning from domestic technology studies

– Domestic technology use governed by rules of the house– Television use indicated who “controlled” an area of the house– Teenagers used individually owned technology to coordinate

using a shared technology (e.g., “quiet” technologies to avoid disrupting other’s routines)

• Designers need to pay attention to the subtle house routines + how occupants adapt new techs?

5: Social implications of aware home technologies

• Social implications of domestic technologies• Are domestic technologies labor saving?– Introduction of technology into the home changes societal

expectations– Has the introduction of technology increased or shifted the

amount of work you do?• TV has changed “good parenting” to controlling what

not if your child watches– In Europe, mobile phones teaches children about managing

money and safely gives them increased independence

6: Reliability

• Current domestic appliances are pretty reliable• Differences: domestic vs. desktop (& ubicomp?) – Development culture

• Embedded vs. general-purpose?

– Technological approaches• Phone (thin) vs. web surfing (thick)

– Expectations of the market• Crashing washing machine vs. desktop?

– Regulations• Highly regulated appliances (due to safety concerns)

7: Inference in the presence of ambiguity

• Current machine inference is kind of bad (e.g. Microsoft Clippit)

• How smart does a smart home have to be?• Is it better not to act, or to act and be wrong?• Modes of intelligence:

– Infer state of world through interpretation of sensor data– Infer existence of states by aggregating other factors (e.g.,

people gathering at a meeting room --> meeting?) – Infer my intent from its view of the state of the world (e.g.,

meeting sharing notes with others)– Preemptively act on the assumptions of intent

7: Inference in the presence of ambiguity

• Predictability is important (e.g., dropping temperature thermostat turns on the heating)

• For a given condition, predictability depends on: – System’s expected behavior under the condition– System’s facilities for detecting/inferring the condition– Provision for user to override the system’s behavior

• How can we redesign the Bluetooth speakers to be more predictable?