Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life: Intelligences, Agencies, Ecologies

Description

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descriptions of empirical work, and design case studies brings together perspectives from interaction design, the humanities, science and technology studies, and engineering, to map, explore and interrogate ways in which our relationships with everyday smart objects might expand and be re-imagined. By offering a critical assessment on the growing place of smart technology in everyday environments, this book outlines a transdisciplinary research agenda for the future of 'smartness' to help define, envision, and inspire future collaborative design practices. These essays propose an understanding and design of smart objects that embrace their hybrid nature as shifting and blending tools, agents, machines, or even 'creatures'. Authors argue that smart objects have the potential to enter into multiple kinds of relationships with humans, and form complex human-nonhuman ecologies that are both meaningful and empowering in the context of everyday life. This book also shines a light on the hidden infrastructures behind the functioning of smart objects with stirring debates tackling questions of technology, human values, and economic and ecological impact. Whether you are a design scholar, design practitioner or design activist this book will inspire through offering theoretical insights, design concepts and practical ways on how to engage in this research agenda for future smartness.

Marco C. Rozendaal is Associate Professor of Interaction Design at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Betti Marenko is Reader in Design and Techno-Digital Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK. William Odom is Assistant Professor in Design at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life is a compelling study of the intelligences, agencies, and ecologies of "smart objects," which are responsive, online devices. The editors and authors apply rich insights about our interrelationships with smart objects to fresh ways of designing them. The various essays in this collection exemplify the corollary processes of putting theory into practice and imagination into objects. This collection will be a great asset to any designer or scholar aspiring to push the boundaries of what design can be. -- Leslie Atzmon, Professor of Graphic Design and Design History, Eastern Michigan University, USA The time when we could think of computational technology as something we simply use is over. The question now is how to live, and live well, with this technology as new breeds of smart objects bring artificial agency at an unprecedented scale into everyday life. To prepare design for this challenge we need to understand the dynamics, not just the static features, of this emerging landscape. We need to understand how perspectives and practices come together and form new trajectories. And that is precisely why we need this book. This is not just a snapshot, it's a collaborative choreography. -- Johan Redstroem, Professor of Design, Umea Institute of Design, Umea University, Sweden Designing objects that can learn, act and relate to humans and non-humans well is a monumental challenge. This collection provides much-needed starting points for an interaction design research agenda for addressing that challenge through expanding possibilities for thinking, making and critiquing "smart objects" and the ecologies in which they live. A sense of curiosity and care infuses the book, sparking imagination but also cultivating sensibilities for the messy implications and non-neutral consequences of things we might design and live with. It is important reading for anyone wanting to develop a wise approach to the design of smart objects -- Heather Wiltse, Associate Professor, Umea Institute of Design, Umea University, Sweden This book took me on a roller-coaster ride through different perspectives, ideas, approaches, theory and examples. Starting from a "more than human" perspective, the book introduces, deepens, alienates, critiques, and speculates on the future of the design space of smart objects in everyday life. In doing so, it offers a compelling research agenda for connected and smart IoT. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and highly recommend it -- Joep Frens, Designer and Researcher in the Future Everyday Group, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands