An Upcycled IoT: Creating Tomorrow’s Internet of Things out of Today’s Household Possessions
Author(s)
Williams, Kristin
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Abstract
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 project 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.
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Date
2022-10-20
Extent
60:30 minutes
Resource Type
Moving Image
Resource Subtype
Lecture