The Process

Final Reflections

The first reflection that I want to share is about the topic, the IoT in the Connected Everyday Things. I do think that nowadays the communication between users and objects has to be made easier and smoother. Even though I do think that the idea of a smart home is still not always immediately understood, and for that reason we still need to explain how a smart home does work, we, as designers, need to work on the simplicity of the communication between context, objects, and final users. The idea of the Internet of Things makes real the already existing connections and networks between objects and contexts, the IoT has to give tools in the design for simplicity of communication and affordances. The most interesting part of the Connected Everyday Things is the idea of a product that, through the usage, changes and modifies itself on the behavior and on the needs of the user.

This research project has been my first research and my first individual experience in my curriculum as a design student. For every designer, it is crucial to have feedback sessions with other people during the entire design process, and this is the reason behind my choice to let my participants cooperate in the process and in the creation of the research question. Through the methodology of participatory design, I have learned how to let the users be part of the process, and how to present to them every insight in order to let the flow of the discussion continue. The co-design in the field of interaction design helps to find the right questions and helps to find new and more user-centred approaches on how to solve the problem. We work to solve the problems of the people, including them in the process is thus crucial.

Moreover, during the process, I have had the opportunity to use two different research approaches, the ethnographic approach and the research-through-design approach. The creation of a prototype with the value of a design probe, based on the analysis of the observations made by the two participants, and the fact that I have had the opportunity to deploy my prototype for a long term user test in a real context, has gave to the research an immediate higher level of the reality and on the cohesion to the topic. The use of a prototype as a design probe gave me the opportunity to dig into the complexity of the pattern of the everyday life of my two participants. Because I have decided to work with a very broad topic, the perception of time, the definition of the research question took me a lot of effort on the analysis of what my participants needed.
In the process it has not been utilized the programming of electronics in the prototype, the initial idea was to use an ArduinoUno board to collect data on the use of the board. Talking with the two participants we discovered that the planning of interviews, the diary study and the self-observations methods used, were a good feedback on the use of the board. Moreover, the told me that knowing that I could track them in a way with the board could have made the interaction with board less spontaneous. Anyway, I do think that to continue this research the step into a technology approach is needed, not in the collection of data but in the visualization of the time passing and in the features for the concept that will be generated. With this project, I have defined better my interest in the everyday life things, a topic that I will maintain for my Final Master Project, and I have improved my research skills. I have learned how to analyze qualitative data, and I think that qualitative data in user-centred design and in interaction design are a valuable tool to understand users needs and problems that the designer has to solve. Starting this project, I was not expecting this kind of results. I hope that my research could be a starting point for other researchers in this field, and I hope that my work could be helpful also for other people to understand the complexity of the everyday life.