Human-Computer Interaction Ph.D. Thesis Defense
Speaker
KRISTIN WILLIAMS
Ph.D. Student
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
When
-
Where
In Person and Virtual - ET
Description
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) promises to enhance even the most mundane of objects
with computational properties. Yet, IoT has largely focused on new devices while
ignoring the home’s many existing possessions. Requiring households to replace their
possessions to adopt IoT yields substantial costs. Beyond financial, these include
waste, work to arrange and orchestrate objects to suit households, and attention
investment to acquire new skills. To address these costs, this dissertation worked
with 10 American families to design an upcycled approach to IoT that makes use of
existing household possessions and then built a system responsive to these findings.
The results 1) describe patterns of families’ socio-material practices, 2) develop a
framework for designing lightweight modification, and 3) presents The IoT Codex—a
book of programmable and inexpensive, battery-free interactive devices—to support
customizing everyday objects with software and web services using stickers. The
presented work offers a lightweight approach to end user programming of everyday
objects for customizing IoT to suit idiosyncratic socio-material practices.
Thesis Committee:
Scott Hudson (Co-Chair)
Jessica Hammer (Co-Chair)
Patrick Carrington
Leah Buechley (University of New Mexico)
Additional Information
In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.