Jarvis in Motion: A Research Artifact for Circulating Lifestyle Values in Public

DOI

We report on a research through design study of how our everyday objects, augmented with technologies, could contribute to disseminating people's lifestyle values in public. We developed Jarvis, a hybrid object of a glass jar and a location-tracking system that allowed us to examine how Jarvis stimulated making lifestyle values visible and sometimes hiding of the values across different places. As a design research artifact, Jarvis seeks to spark meaningful interactions as zero-waste practitioners carry it around in their daily routines in public. The data visualized through Jarvis demonstrate how users’ values are spread out locally. 18 zero-waste followers participated in a week-long deployment with a design probe followed by post-deployment interviews. Our findings highlight the role of different agencies in circulating values represented by Jarvis. We discuss our methodological insights on hybrid objects, and how the circulation of values may inform us about the alternative roles of technologies in speaking for our lifestyle values.