Tracking the Consumption of Home Essentials

Predictions of people's behaviour increasingly drive interactions with a new generation of IoT services designed to support everyday life in the home, from shopping to heating. Based on the premise that such automation is difficult due to the contingent nature of people's practices, in this work we explore the nature of these contingencies in depth. We have designed and conducted a technology probe that made use of simple linear predictions as a provocation, and invited people to track the life of their household essentials over a two-month period. Through a mixed-method approach we demonstrate the challenges of simple predictions, and in turn identify eight categories of contingencies that influenced prediction accuracy. We discuss strategies for how designers of future predictive IoT systems may take the contingencies into account by removing, hiding, revealing, managing, or exploiting the system uncertainty at the core of the issue.