CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Examining the Design and Use of Internet of Things Technology in Public Life

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The goal of this research is to advance an empirical and systematic understanding of the design and use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for enabling, organizing, and monitoring collective social activities. The IoT is the ubiquitous system of objects imbued with computational capacity, connected to and communicating with one another. A key result of this work will be a comprehensive set of design guidelines for creating IoT technologies that can be used by anyone, that will be disseminated through a series of products and public engagement strategies targeting community stakeholders and more general audiences in media venues. Such guidelines are commonly understood as high-level heuristics that people can take up and apply to their work to generate effective designs. By embodying the guidelines in the design of novel prototypes that enable public life, this project will help people more easily participate in public life at varying scales. Lastly, by evaluating the strengths and limitations of these prototypes in collective design reviews, it will generate methodological insights that may be adopted and extended by other researchers in the fields of human-centered computing, science and technology studies, and design.This empirical design research will provide insight into how the social-technical configurations of IoT products and services might contribute to more understanding of, and participation in, the networks of interaction that comprise our public lives. In particular, leveraging "tracing" as both a design tactic and a novel capacity of IoT, the research will demonstrate and explain how the technical connectedness that characterizes IoT might be communicated in ways that foster a greater sense of social connectedness. Traces are marks that indicate the passing of some other phenomenon, for example data generated as a by-product of people's online activity. Charting traces in the engineering and use of information technology may produce an understanding of the complex networks of actors, structures, and processes within our public life that leads to new possibilities for action, insight and engagement. As a design tactic, traces can serve to foster a greater sense of the connectedness of socio-technical systems. Thus, this research will discover and codify new design guidelines for successful IoT design for public life. Additionally, it will develop an innovative fusion of research methods, combining the prototyping of IoT technologies with external design reviews from both design experts and community members to validate those prototypes.