Talk by Carolina Fuentes

Carolina will present her recent work to the lab.

The Home Essentials study

I will be presenting our study, Home Essentials, which is part of the A-IoT project in the lab. In our work, we focused on understanding the contingent nature of domestic grocery shopping practices and the consumption of “essential” consumable products in the home. The study includes the design of a technology probe called “Home Essentials” that made use of simple linear predictions as a provocation, and with which we invited people to track the life of their household essentials over a two-month period. Through a mixed-method approach, we focused on our participants’ experiences of using the probe and in turn identified eight categories of contingencies that influenced prediction accuracy. I will discuss the various strategies for how designers of future predictive IoT systems may take the contingencies into account.