Advocate: (re)shaping the smart home with a river as the primary stakeholder.
Participatory design is commonly defined as a design approach in which all stakeholders are involved in the design process. This approach is based on the fundamental assumption that all stakeholders are human. The objective of this project is to explore what happens when the definition of stakeholder is expanded to include nonhuman entities. In the context of this project, that nonhuman entity is a river ecosystem. What does it mean for a river ecosystem to be involved in the design process? How can an entity without a voice be heard within a design process? This project will begin to explore these questions through the lens of a connected home. I chose to situate this exploration in the context of a connected home because as domestic devices become increasingly networked, there is an opportunity to play with the functionality and use of these devices on behalf of a nonhuman actor. What does the smart home ecosystem produced by a design process that includes a river as a stakeholder look like? How are the relationships between devices, humans, and river shaped and reshaped? These questions were explored through workshops, prototypes, and possible future scenarios.
Introduction
The first challenge I faced as a designer in having a natural system like a river as the primary stakeholder to design for were some pretty fundamental questions. What needs does a river have? What could the river ecosystem want? Because it is impossible to conduct conventional user interviews with a river, however comical they would be, I sought the answer to these questions through conversations with researchers at Umeå University and other experts. I was in a sense asking the questions from the river’s point of view and attempting to learn what human activity has on me, the river. What I found was that one of the biggest impacts on the Umeå River ecosystem is the uneven flow and water level caused by inconsistent use of the Stornorrfors dam just upstream from the city of Umeå. Before continuing it is important to note that there are many factors causing the dam usage to fluctuate. These factors include: keeping a consistent stream of electricity when other sources of production, like wind power, are low and seasonal snow melt or heavy rain. This makes it difficult to make a direct correlation from water flow through a dam to energy use by an individual household, but if the other functions of a dam as described were not impacting water flow at the time, evening out energy use throughout a day would help to make the flow of the Umeå River more consistent and less impactful on the river ecosystem. So the challenge the river is facing is how can it get the local community to shift its behavior in order to use energy in a more consistent way throughout the day.
Current energy usage follows a relatively predictable pattern in Nordic countries. Through interviews with staff at Energi Företagen, Vattenfall, Umeå Kommun, and Umeå Energi I was able to get a better understanding of what behavior change would be needed to more sustainably use energy in everyday life. One interviewee went as far as to say that this type of energy usage behavior change is impossible because people are so dead set on their routines. This sparked an interest in me because I am interested in what role design can play in transitioning society to more sustainable behavior and what design interventions or futures would be necessary to achieve this transition. The challenge of reflective energy use behavior change and how this change could occur through the use of an IoT ecosystem became the focus of my research. I chose to focus on the smart home context because it is the largest touch point humans have in thier everyday life.
Connected Home = Malleable Home
A smart home can be defined as an ecosystem that has the ability to control lighting, climate, entertainment systems, and appliances. Users interact with this ecosystem through either their mobile phones or some form of smart assistant. Actions are created for the convenience of the human inhabitant. You don’t need to look farther than how Google pitches and defines it’s Google Home product for an example of this type of optimization. There is a focus on control and convenience with statements like “control without the controller” and “run your home just by asking”. This product is created for the control and comfort of a human within an increasingly connected domestic ecosystem.
As human domestic life is increasingly controlled and orchestrated through the use of connected devices it begs the question: how does this change everyday behavior? Ezio Manzini hypothesizes that,
The world is characterized by a high and growing level of connectivity…The hypothesis proposed here is that an increase in connectivity reduces the solidity of organizations…so an increase in connectivity loosens the constraints on the configuration of organizations, making them plastic, and then fluid.
By taking this hypothesis in the context of a home ecosystem, the more connected devices within the organization of a home the more fluid the home ecosystem becomes. This increase in fluidity is an invitation for reshaping how humans act in a domestic ecosystem. In this project my aim is to explore ways in which a nonhuman stakeholder could become a participant in the redesign or reshaping of domestic space. Objects have the ability to inspire reflection as a form of behavioral change. Stolterman, Ghajargar, and Wiberg explored this by creating a lamp prototype that inspires reflection on a users mobility choices and the character of the lamp changes in order to communicate these choices. Through the use of data, objects are increasingly able to take on more meaning and communicate meaning beyond their direct functionality. The transportation lamp is first and foremost a light, but it also inspires reflection on mobility choices and changes it’s aesthetic and function accordingly. If objects have the capacity for influencing behavioral change, then how could a home of connected objects and products change human behavior in order to benefit a natural entity, like a river.
A question I became very interested in was, can a human and river co-create a more sustainable domestic ecosystem through a sympoietic process? A sympoietic process is a nonlinear approach to collaborative making and thinking, inclusive of a wide variety of human and nonhuman, organic as well as inorganic actors (Frankjaer 2019). In order to explore what this co-creation could look like it is important to consider the first question Forlano identifies; in what ways are capabilities, agency, and power distributed across humans, machines, and natural systems? My exploration began with the question of how a river would communicate and what would be the character of that communication?
Talk like a river
If a river is a participant in the shaping of the domestic ecosystem a question that comes to mind rather quickly is what does the communication and collaboration look like? I organized a workshop to probe at how a river would communicate within a connected home context. The workshop opened with an exploration of how a river would talk or communicate. An example of this is that a river communicates it temperature by freezing. The results were focused on the qualities of a river like flow, bubbling, and cracking, but there were some interesting more biosphere focused explorations like animal populations, migratory species, and bank formation. This was helpful in understanding ways a river could communicate, but I wanted to explore more in depth the character of this communication. How would it turn off a device that was negatively impacting it? How much control would the river have in a smart home? Would it work with the human to achieve its goal or would it impose its will with little negotiation.
I created characters using Forlano’s proposed spectrum of competitive/collaborative and hierarchical/horizontal. This produced the characters of friend, parent, coach and dictator. Using these characters I challenged participants to complete a task on behalf of a river. These tasks included delaying, stopping, shortening, or encouraging the use of a domestic object like a light, washing machine, or charging of devices. The results were quite varied ranging from a smart assistant that distracts the human from using a device by continually engaging in conversation to a smart assistant who simply refuses to execute the commands it is given.
After the workshop I came the the conclusion that a river would not speak, it would just do. Like a river communicates its temperature by freezing and reshapes a landscape into a valley through the process of erosion, a device acting on the behalf of a river would need communicate through action. As a result of this fact, the power dynamic of the natural system in the smart home ecosystem is quite radically shifted. By communicating through action, the smart assistant would need to take direct control over devices & modify the way they function. Through a continual negotiation and adjustment of device functionality the human transforms their behavior to sync with the river. As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words.
Advocate
The result of my research and workshop was a prototype of a smart assistant I entitled Advocate. Advocate is a smart assistant that is designed to shape and reshape the way a connected home functions with the expressed goal of balancing the use of energy of the inhabitants over the course of daily life. Advocate is a representative of the Umeå River and acts on its behalf.
Advocate uses data of hydropower generation and river data (flow, water level, species count) to (re)shape the functionality of a smart home to sync the needs of the Umeå River with the energy consumption habits of the surrounding community. It does this through full control of all connected devices in the home as well as its inhabitants personal devices & services.
The form Advocate takes is in direct contrast to current smart assistants that are seemingly designed to dissolve into the background of the domestic context. Essentially they seem to be designed to disappear. Advocate is intended to call attention to energy use through not only how it modifies its surrounding ecosystem, but also how it looks and changes based on the data it is connected to. Considering the topic of exploration was connecting energy use to river health, I drew inspiration from dams and water wheels. I produced various prototypes to explore how Advocate would behave and communicate. In the end the final prototype has two wheels, one representing the flow and health of the river and the other representing current energy consumption within the home. The prototype consists of a day in the life of living with Advocate. Actions illustrated by the prototype include: shifting alarms to start the day earlier when less energy is being used, ordering a more energy efficient breakfast, turning on the slow cooker while the inhabitants are at work, and turning on reading lights while simultaneously turning off the TV. These actions correspond with the changing of wheel speed as energy use fluctuates throughout the day. As energy use increases the wheels become increasingly out of sync. By changing energy usage the wheels illustrate whether the shift made benefited the river by either speeding up or slowing down the speed in which they turn.
There is a nob on the right hand side of the prototype that is intended to be the way in which the inhabitant can negotiate their energy consumption with Advocate. An example of this could be that the inhabitant needs to have lights and computer use during peak hours and Advocate modifies the space to encourage the use of less energy taxing devices. The trouble is the inhabitant has an exam the next day which they need to study for. The inhabitant can inform Advocate of this increased urgency of energy need by tuning how Advocate modifies the device ecosystem until it fits their current energy need. The nob is left unlabeled as it is the next element of discussion to explore through the prototype. Does it control urgency of energy need like in this example or is it a way to control how much agency Advocate has? These questions are still unanswered and the prototype is intended to inspire and challenge viewers to think about what it would be like to give over control of their domestic environment to a natural system. Would they change their behavior? How would they negotiate this reshaping with Advocate?
