Dramatic Things: Investigating Value Conflicts in Smart Home through Enactment and Co-speculation

Research Background and Issues

• Issues and Challenges: The authors identify that while smart homes aim to enhance convenience, comfort, safety, and other household values, they often face complex and dynamic design challenges due to conflicts between these values (e.g., security vs. privacy, comfort vs. sustainability). These conflicts may arise from inconsistencies in goals between products, shifts in users' value priorities, or discord in user-product interactions.
• Significance: The design of smart home technologies is often idealized as providing seamless and harmonious user experiences. However, these technologies can introduce unnecessary complexity and friction into daily life, sometimes making users feel controlled by the technology rather than liberated by it.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: While technical disciplines have explored how to reduce conflicts through architecture, policies, and protocols, these efforts primarily focus on the technical level and overlook the multidimensional value interactions within complex household environments. Deeper value conflicts (e.g., short-term vs. long-term goals of individuals) and their impact on the smart home ecosystem require more comprehensive investigation.

Solution

• Research Methods: The authors propose using two methods—"Enactment" and "Co-speculation"—to explore the complexities of value conflicts in smart homes. They recruited professional actors to perform scenarios depicting various smart home conflicts, investigating value conflicts between users and smart home products as well as conflicts among products themselves.
• Innovation: By dramatizing smart home conflicts, the authors go beyond the limitations of traditional technical research, emphasizing the importance of experiential reflection. This approach helps designers understand real-life value frictions rather than assuming users will mechanically accept or ignore product recommendations.
• Implementation Steps: The research team designed multiple scenarios covering conflicts between users and products (e.g., comfort vs. health), conflicts among products (e.g., thermostat vs. plant pot in terms of sustainability and plant needs), and complex nested value relationships between users and multiple products. Professional actors played the roles of users and smart home products, engaging in improvisational performances to depict interactions and conflicts, from which design insights were extracted.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings: The authors identified three levels of user experiences with smart home conflicts:

  1. How users manage competing values simultaneously;
  2. The experience of interacting with smart products that "enforce their own values";
  3. How users handle conflicts between multiple products or between products and themselves.

  Additionally, the study found that many users perceive these conflicts as "win-lose" scenarios, even when the values in question originate from their own priorities.

• Advantages Over Existing Solutions: Compared to technology-driven conflict resolution approaches, this study reveals the hybrid nature of values that traditional design methods fail to fully address. It highlights how conflicts can reveal dynamic value relationships rather than relying solely on algorithms or rules for resolution.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results: Analyzing the performance content and actors' reflections, the study proposes three core shifts in smart home design narratives:

  1. From pursuing "value consistency" to "value transparency," enabling smart products to clearly communicate the rationale behind their decisions and how they fulfill values.
  2. From mere "service provision" to "mutual care," where smart home products not only cater to users but also make users feel respected and aligned with shared goals.
  3. From emphasizing "autonomy" to "responsiveness," designing products and systems that are highly adaptive and dynamically responsive to user needs.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  1. Limitations: The study is based on simulations by professional actors rather than long-term practices with actual users. It leans toward situational, immediate reactions and does not fully capture users' long-term emotions and adaptability in multidimensional contexts.
  2. Future Directions: The authors suggest conducting longitudinal field studies involving real users to capture how value conflicts evolve over time and how design can promote transparency, care, and responsiveness in everyday use. Future research should also include diverse household types (e.g., co-living arrangements or mobile homes) and consider the impact of social and gender dynamics.

Through this study, the authors advocate for smart home designers to leverage value conflicts to deepen their understanding of users and transform these conflicts into mechanisms for driving sustainable innovation.