Ubiquitous Systems and the Family: Thoughts about the Networked Home
July 16, 2009 by Richard Conlanhttp://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2009/proceedings/a6-little.pdf
Linda Little, Elizabeth Sillence and Pam Briggs
Overall the well-being of a family is dependent on how well the members of the family communicate and interact. If we are creating products and services for families it is important to recognize that the dynamics of a different families can be very different. The project organizers sought to consider this in designing an accessible vision of the future, getting different stakeholders on-board by eliciting user feedback at a series of workshops.
The researchers developed four scenarios related to everyday tasks and showed them to thirty-eight focus groups in the UK, organizing participants by gender, technical education level, and age. Overall there were 325 participants ranging from age sixteen to eighty-nine. The scenario presented here at SOUPS was focused on the networked home, which is envisioned as a smart home able to respond to wants, needs, desires, while delivering personalized services. A key question is what trust, privacy, and security issues emerge.
The participants initially discussed how neat some of the futuristic ideas were, but then delved into questions of who controls the system and who was able to see what. Questions were asked such as: Who controls the system? Who adds/removes items and determines which alerts are display, and to whom? Who within the family is able to see the information? Who outside the family? Is it usable by everyone? Or limited to parents? Is it compatible in a way that it can be extended by external parties?