Products as Agents

2017

Design-based inquiries into the smart and connected products of the Internet of Things (IoT) lack a coherent understanding of the impact of such products on society. This project proposed a new taxonomy for smart products, which would allow articulation on their current state and future, and provide insights to designers for creating meaningful and aesthetic products of IoT. Central to this framework was the proposition that the current productscape should best be analyzed through the metaphor of “agency”.

Products of IoT can exhibit different behaviors as agents. We consider that the current trends in IoT point out to three roles: the Collector, the Actor, and the Creator. Each behavior has a different relevance for the HCI field and calls for a different mode of inquiry. These roles are not meant as disconnected categories, but rather envisioned as a scale. The degree of product agency increases from the Collector type towards the Creator type. Also within the same category, some products may display more agency than the others. We used this taxonomy to compare, abstract, and generalize the current approaches and trends in HCI research, as well as to discuss the design challenges that follow from the form and behavior of such agents. 

Related Publications:

Nazli Cila, Iskander Smit, Elisa Giaccardi, and Ben Kröse. 2017. Products as Agents: Metaphors for Designing the Products of the IoT Age. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 448–459. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025797