Understanding family collaboration around lightweight modification of everyday objects in the home

Abstract

The internet-of-things (IoT) carries substantial costs by urging households to replace their possessions with new, internet connected versions of everyday objects. Beyond financial, these costs include waste, work to arrange and orchestrate objects to suit households, and that of acquiring new skills. Upcycling domestic objects could offer households greater discretion and control over these costs by supporting the ability to tailor IoT to the home. To understand how households might do this, we conducted a home study with 10 diverse American households over 7 days to surface the approaches families are likely to use when tailoring IoT to their existing possessions. We asked family members to enact their process using endowed sticker props—IoT Stickers—to modify objects in their home. We develop a framework of how families make light weight modifications of domestic possessions, summarize trends of their object modifications, and describe the burdens such a system could impose.