Interaction design is about creating meaningful relationships between people and their man-made surroundings. Nowadays, our physical living environment is increasingly intertwined with digital technologies, developing towards a hyperconnected society: a society where every physical thing can have the digital capabilities to gather and process data, and communicate with other things [13]. In other words, the emergent technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon provide the opportunities to design smart environments, where numerous things will be sensing, reasoning and communicating, merging the physical and digital world.

 

This fusion of physical and digital functionalities is altering the relationships between people and their environment. When the things we use have the ability to change themselves, we can see them as starting to ‘live’ [8]. What functionalities and experiences open up through this new breed of things?  

In my view, it is the designer's role to carefully explore the answers to these questions. Carefully, as these changes in the way we interact with our living environment will consequently change the way people interact with each other [5]. 

 

I strongly believe that to understand - and thereafter carefully create - these networked and smart things, different perspectives than only user-centered design methods are needed. First of all, a thing-centered perspective [e.g. 2,3] proved to be a useful viewpoint to gain insights in ‘artifact-ecologies’[2], in order to understand the entanglements among objects and the way they are used. Secondly, an ecological perspective, as for example Barkers’ behavioral settings in ecological psychology [10], provides a viewpoint from which human behavior patterns can be observed in relation to their physical environment. From this viewpoint, the impact of artifact ecologies can be evaluated. Along the way of designing on the basis of these perspectives, I am interested in creating new design and/or evaluation methods, incorporating these viewpoints. 

 

However, I mostly value and enjoy conceptualizing these smart, networked things itself. My aim is to balance the relationships between users and things by designing for reciprocity with our living environments. 

I believe that the most elegant, flexible and simple way to do so is through a decentralized system configuration. In this way, designing such systems very much resembles the practice of Agent Based Modeling. Next to that, I believe that the interaction with such systems should be designed to fit people and their cultural values, instead of the other way around. Theories, perspectives and tools informed by sociology, human perception and environmental psychology often find their way into my design processes, for example Erickson and Kelloggs’ theory of social translucence [6], the DASS framework [9], the attention-interaction continuum [1] and Altmans’ privacy regulation theory [7]. My specific interest in the combination of these fields lies in the topics of shared spaces and calm technology [12] in the home context.