The Inflatable Cat: Idiosyncratic Ideation Of Smart Objects For The Home
This took some time get published and indeed it is my first CHI paper. This work is both a team effort of the wonderful Miteinander research group of which I was principal investigator from 2014 to 2019 at TU Chemnitz and Prof. Dr. Will Odom from SFU Burnaby, Canada and Prof. Dr. Eva Hornecker from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany.
Research on product experience has a history in investigating the sensory and emotional qualities of interacting with objects. However, this notion has not been fully expanded to the design space of co-designing smart objects. In this paper, we report on findings from a series of co-design workshops where we used the toolkit Loaded Dice in conjunction with a card set that aimed to support participants in reflecting the sensory qualities of domestic smart objects. We synthesize and interpret findings from our study to help illustrate how the workshops supported co-designers in creatively ideating concepts for emotionally valuable smart objects that better connect personal inputs with the output of smart objects. Our work contributes a case example of how a co-design approach that emphasizes situated sensory exploration can be effective in enabling co-designers to ideate concepts of idiosyncratic smart objects that closely relate to the characteristics of their domestic living situations.
Arne Berger, William Odom, Michael Storz, Andreas Bischof, Albrecht Kurze, and Eva Hornecker. 2019. The Inflatable Cat: Idiosyncratic Ideation of Smart Objects for the Home. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 401, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300631