Who Should Hold Control? Rethinking Empowerment in Home Automation among Cohabitants through the Lens of Co-Design

Title of the Paper

Who Should Hold Control? Rethinking Empowerment in Home Automation among Cohabitants through the Lens of Co-Design

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Smart Home System Design
• Keywords:
  Co-Design, Home Automation, Empowerment, Card-Based Tool, Smart Home, Cohabitant, Power Dynamics, Negotiation, Trigger-Action Programming, Democratization

Research Background and Problem

• Existing Problems and Challenges:

  • While smart home automation technologies enhance users' control over their households, these technology-driven solutions often fail to meet the needs of users with diverse technical skills and social backgrounds, and may even exacerbate power imbalances within households.
  • Current home automation designs lack collaborative consideration of holistic needs, overlooking the coordination and negotiation processes among members in shared living environments.
  • Non-tech-savvy users (e.g., the elderly and children) are often excluded from benefiting due to their inability to adapt to complex automation systems.

• Significance:

  • Smart homes have become a critical component of future household technologies, influencing people's quality of daily life and their attitudes toward technology usage.
  • The shortcomings of current research have failed to achieve true technological democratization, instead intensifying technological and social inequalities within households.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • The authors view smart homes as a "co-design" process, aiming to reduce technological centralism in design through collaborative efforts.
  • While related studies discuss improving user experience, few consider the social dimensions of smart homes, particularly the power dynamics and collaboration models in shared spaces.

Solution

• Proposed Approach:

  • Designed a card-based tool to help cohabitants visually engage in the collaborative design of home automation.
  • Simplified the complexity of Trigger-Action Programming (TAP) through cards and a live lab setup, making it comprehensible and operable.
  • Explored how "empowerment" manifests in home automation through five co-design workshops conducted in a real smart home living lab environment.

• Innovative Contributions:

  • Introduced a novel card-based tool into the design process of automation rules for smart homes, enhancing non-technical users' perception and understanding of rules.
  • Framed existing home automation issues as "problematic co-design," emphasizing its deficiencies in group decision-making.
  • Provided a participatory and open atmosphere in workshops and labs to explore negotiation models within household power dynamics.

• Implementation Steps and Key Techniques:

  1. Designed visual card tools, including device cards, environment cards, and custom cards, simulating traditional TAP rules.
  2. Added user-friendly "trigger conditions" and "response actions" to the cards, connected through labeled logic.
  3. Designed and conducted five co-design workshops to observe and study participants' interactions and feedback.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Findings:

  • The card-based tool demonstrated strong perceptual affordances in helping users understand home automation rules.
  • Cohabitants could directly express their needs during negotiation activities, creating personalized solutions while considering the interests of other household members.
  • Workshops revealed power dynamics in household collaboration, such as frequent compromises between couples and a greater focus on equality and boundaries among roommates.

• Comparison with Existing Solutions:

  • Current home automation is typically designed by developers and introduced as a one-size-fits-all solution, ignoring the collaborative and diverse needs of different user groups.
  • This study addressed the "technology-driven" limitations of home automation through the card-based tool, shifting from "top-down technology design" to "user-driven design."

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • Users reported that the card tool enhanced their understanding of rules and reduced learning costs, particularly for non-tech-savvy individuals like the elderly.
  • Discussion records showed that by collaboratively constructing rules, users not only improved their understanding of their partners' needs but also reflected on their own use of home automation.
  • The collaboration models in the workshops revealed how inequalities among members manifest in technology use and how design can mitigate these issues.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • The sample size was limited and did not fully cover large, complex households with multiple generations.
  • The tool's design still risks oversimplifying existing TAP systems; future work needs to refine it to align with commercial and technical standards.
  • The current study primarily focused on East Asian cultural contexts, contributing localized insights, but future research should consider cross-cultural comparative studies.
  • The study calls for more "design in the wild" approaches in smart home design to explore the potential for technological democratization in more complex, real-life scenarios.

Conclusion

This paper demonstrates the potential for empowerment in smart homes within cohabitant environments through card-based co-design workshops. It highlights how supporting user participation, collaboration, and discussion can address current issues in home automation design. The research provides direction and guidance for the socio-technical shift in home automation.