Prototyping an Escape Room Full of Future IoT Interactions
Ever felt unsure when your smart speaker is and isn’t listening. There was quite a reaction when it was revealed Samsung TVs were listening in on us. Yet now we’re inviting all types of sensing into our homes and everyday lives, Fitbits, Smart Light Bulbs and voice controlled heating systems. IoT and AI promises to revolutionise our lives but …. (there’s always a but)….will we be controlling these smart internet connected objects or will they be controlling us, influencing how we behave and what we understand to be secure and private?
In smart cities we don’t have a choice to opt out of the mass collection of information through internet connected devices. But what if we could avoid detection? How would we do that? That’s exactly what we’ll prototyping in Chattanooga on March 8th and 9th. Together with librarians, activists, educators, enthusiasts and community members we’re spending 2 days designing and prototyping what future interactions with an IoT world might be like.
We were super excited when we were invited to be involved in thinking about an IoT Escape Room as a learning tool. It’s a fantastic opportunity giving us a chance to explore IoT in a puzzle space, encouraging people to mentally thinking about IoT in a different way than in the consumer space. It could be a really powerful platform to entertain dialogues with the general public about the societal issues IoT is raising. It enables us to learn what people do and don’t want from IoT questioning the challenges and possibilities.
People behave in different ways in different settings, in shops or in libraries so how might people behave in an escape room full of IoT? We believe it’s healthy to pose these questions and approach the topic using alternative learning environments, bringing technologies into them to find out how people might behave. We want to move away from the silicon valley mindset of problem solving, speed, winning, removing friction and failing fast towards a more reflective space where we consider societal issues. Could an IoT Escape room to fill this gap, creating a reflective space where people are encouraged to think about privacy and security? Join us in Chattanooga to find out!
The current model for Escape Rooms focuses on exploring puzzles and problem solving but we want to adapt escape rooms to work for more socially motivated agendas. Where the activity is more about problem exploring rather than problem solving. What would that look like?
For us, at the Open IoT Studio, the opportunity to collectively design and prototype an IoT Escape room is a way to explore perceptions and understandings of IoT as well as investigate potential IoT interactions. Instead of reading about the impact of IoT in our society the event is a way to experience it, question it, act it out and challenge what is happening with it, in a hands on active way. It’s a way of engaging people with content that’s quite heavy and difficult to understand but in a light active explorative setting. Asking people to prototype stories and make props for Smart City narratives will encourage us to consider what these technologies do, how they currently work, should work and could work better for our society.
Hope we’ll see you soon in Chattanooga!!
