On Tuesday, March 31 at 10.15, Anuradha Reddy, PhD candidate in Interaction Design, will hold her 90 percent PhD seminar. The title of the forthcoming thesis is At Home ‘in’ IoT? – A Design Inquiry. Daniela Rosner, Associate Professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington, will function as discussant.

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom.

To be sure that everything works smoothly, please install the Zoom software on your computer beforehand. Please then join the meeting through https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/494267134 (Meeting ID: 494 267 134). Please join the meeting in time and turn off your audio and video during the first part of the seminar. The chat will be open for questions (or pointing out technical issues) throughout the seminar. We will try to have a broader round of questions at the end where all listeners can turn on their microphones.

Below you can find an abstract for the seminar. If you would like to read the manuscript before the seminar, contact Anuradha (anuradha.reddy@mau.se).

The technology frameworks supporting the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) have operated in domestic spaces for several decades now i.e., smart connected homes. However, its strong scientific and industry hold has left little room for understanding what it means to be at home in everyday spaces constituted by things participating in hidden and distributed data networks. The thesis argues that stories of use and appropriation in IoT’s design and development fall short of many meanings of home, generated by the continually shifting nature of data-driven things and potentialities for interaction. The thesis acknowledges how IoT brings us, at once, intimately closer to things and contexts we could once never reach—lending new homely imaginaries, and also how IoT’s capacities can help surface the complexities in what is conceived as ‘home’ today.

This Interaction Design thesis focuses on ‘participation’—the central tenet that guides our sense of belonging—to be at home in the world. This focus examines different forms of participation that are currently at play in IoT and how they support sense-making processes involving people, things, sensors, and data. By adopting frameworks in participatory design, technoscience, and feminist approaches, this thesis tackles sense-making at the most intimate level—situated, material, and embodied—and extends those meanings to things that have uniquely artificial, agential, and immaterial capacities. A methodological framework called ‘tales of things’ is employed to elicit subjective and reflexive experiences in the participatory sense-making process through design experimentation and prototyping. Importantly, the thesis sustains the ongoing ethical project of surfacing the implications of IoT by calling for active and responding bodies in re-claiming the sense of home in our daily lives.