Juggling a growing IoT system

Aim: Design a modus operandi for a home IoT system, revolved around community and light.
Theme: IoT, Growing systems, Rich interaction
Expertise Areas: Creativity & Aesthetics, Technology & Realization

This experimental design journey aimed to design a modus operandi for a home IoT system, revolved around community and light. The process towards designing such a product involved a process of several iterations and assignments. Finishing with an interactive embodied ball that has con­nectable halves, allowing for a growing system. Each half can function individually and can be physically connected with another half to create an emergent functionality. Lim­itations of the final design consist of a lack of feedforward with regard to these emergent functionalities and a limited amount of controls. It can be argued that the final design is too complex for the user to understand without essentially exploring and learning what the emergent functionality of two core functionalities is. Whether this explorative learning process is actually an obstructive or enjoyable facet of using emergent functionalities in IoT systems needs to be further explored.

The intention was to design a product that has rich and embodied interaction while offering the user growing func­tionalities, using a modular design. We believe rich inter­action within the scope of IoT is possible if the focus is not on offering as many functionalities to the user as possible. The general image of IoT devices is that you should be able to perform as many actions with one device as possible. However, using technology currently available, a balance exists between the number of functionalities that can be provided and the amount of rich interactions to control these functionalities. In our opinion a trade off can be made between functionality and rich interaction, albeit in the right context. Like our modular device, where certain functional­ities such as choosing a specific song are removed in favor of rich interaction controls. In our case this could be done as removing certain very procedural and individual interactions contributes to the design goal, which is creating a device that improves community/unity.

Our direction and take on designing with rich interaction were focused on entertainment and human connection. However, we have come to realize that rich interaction can also be very meaningful for other sectors such as health. Rich interaction can improve the users understanding of the interaction and effectiveness of a device. Therefore, general­ly we believe the added value of rich and embodied interac­tion weighs up to potentially losing some of the functional­ities of a design. Nevertheless, a lot of future work remains to be done to discover the ultimate balance between rich interaction possibilities in relation to functionality. Even so, we believe that there exists a strong potential for the virtue of modular designs.