Proceed with Care: Reimagining Home IoT Through a Care Perspective

Title of the Paper

Proceed with Care: Reimagining Home IoT Through a Care Perspective

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Home Internet of Things (IoT), Ethics of Care
• Keywords: Home IoT, Design Ethnography, Ethics of Care, Research through Design, Smart Home, Object Care, Sustainability

Research Background and Problem

• Identified Problems or Challenges: Current home IoT technology designs primarily focus on commercial values such as efficiency, productivity, and security, while neglecting the complex values present in domestic spaces, such as care, privacy, imagination, and power dynamics. Moreover, these technologies often obscure the significant care labor that exists between users and technology by promoting "frictionless" operations.
• Why This Problem is Important: As network technologies become increasingly indispensable, home IoT technologies not only influence work and communication but also have profound impacts on care practices and relationships within the domestic environment. Understanding the interaction between care and IoT offers new possibilities for design ethics and innovation.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: Building on research in the HCI field regarding smart homes and domestic environments, the authors advocate for using the ethics of care as a perspective to rethink the possibilities of home IoT design, addressing demands for trust, fairness, openness, and inclusivity in IoT systems.

Solution

• Proposed Method or Solution: Through six months of design ethnography research and the "Research through Design" (RtD) approach, the authors explored the care relationships between household residents and objects, proposing four care themes: Care Spectacle, Care Liminality, Ontological Braiding, and Care Condition. Based on these themes, they designed four home IoT concepts to explore innovative directions for IoT design from the perspective of care ethics.
• Innovative Aspects: The paper introduces care ethics as a core methodology for IoT design and presents the novel perspective of "object care" to reveal new possibilities for home IoT design. These designs not only focus on functionality but also emphasize the emotional, relational, and material aspects of care practices in domestic spaces.
• Implementation Steps and Techniques:
  1. Design Ethnography: Documented daily care practices in home environments through critical participant observations and drawings.
  2. Thematic Analysis: Extracted research themes from diverse data sources using open and axial coding.
  3. Concept Design: Proposed IoT device concepts in the form of sketches and co-created and iterated designs with participants.
  4. Concept Feedback: Presented the designs to multiple participants, collected their feedback, and refined the design ideas.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes:
  • Identified four themes of object care: Care Spectacle, Care Liminality, Ontological Braiding, and Care Condition, which were developed into four home IoT concepts:
    1. Secure Sensations: A system that generates passwords based on tactile sensations, emphasizing complex and pleasurable experiences.
    2. Care4Tech: A service for hosting and relocating smart devices, focusing on the uniqueness of IoT devices and their integration into the home.
    3. Sensitive Snuggler: A smart blanket that reflects changes in the surrounding physical, emotional, and social environment.
    4. Meditative Hub: A smart hub that emphasizes the collaborative regeneration and rebalancing of all devices in the home.
  • Proposed care ethics as a design framework to enrich the ethical considerations and future imagination of home IoT design.
• Comparative Advantages Over Existing Solutions: Unlike typical IoT devices that prioritize efficiency and automation, these concepts promote emotional interaction between users and tools through aesthetics, sensory experiences, and relationships, redefining the role and purpose of smart home technologies.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results: User feedback revealed the potential of these designs to foster emotional connections and reflective spaces while also sparking discussions about the cost of care labor and the prioritization of smart devices.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • Applying care ethics may face challenges in practical design, such as neglecting macro-level values and the theoretical limitations of the design framework in transcending micro-level contexts.
  • The authors suggest enhancing designers' transparency regarding the universal values of care ethics and systematically listening to the voices of "concrete others" to drive transformative design in home IoT technologies.

Conclusion and Outlook

• The authors propose care as a perspective for designing home IoT, exploring how IoT can foster, better experience, or respond to the complex values within the home. In future research, care ethics can serve as a concrete tool to revisit and innovate on issues of power, labor, and neglect. This study provides designers in the fields of design and HCI with a new methodology to address the ethical and imaginative challenges of IoT.