Sensorstation: Exploring Simple Sensor Data in the Context of a Shared Apartment
This work was a team effort of the wonderful Miteinander research group of which I was principal investigator from 2014 to 2019 at TU Chemnitz in collaboration with Dr. Chris Frauenberger from TU Wien.
We present Sensorstation, a research product to explore the effect of smart sensors and services on the communal life within a shared apartment. Sensorstation utilizes wireless sensors and a shared output device displaying a steady data stream of sensor based notifications. It was deployed on the kitchen table in a shared apartment for 19 days to enable communal residents to co-design and to co-speculate on smart sensors and services in the context of their shared apartment. We synthesize and interpret findings to illustrate how residents created positive connections between each other, while simultaneously exercising self-monitoring, control over others, and contemplating reward systems and penalties. Our work contributes to a nuanced understanding of smart technology for shared apartments. We argue that design has an obligation to consider smart technology that acknowledges boundaries and to provide negotiation spaces to configure agency.
Teresa Denefleh, Arne Berger, Albrecht Kurze, Andreas Bischof, and Christopher Frauenberger. 2019. Sensorstation: Exploring Simple Sensor Data in the Context of a Shared Apartment. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 683–695. https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322309