Project on Family, Control, and the Smart Home

The Problem

In the last several years the technology industry has expanded its focus from improving work productivity to addressing needs and opportunities for computing in everyday life. Included in this expanded scope is the smart home, offering the promise of an intelligent environment to assist families in managing the chaos in their lives. However, over the last several decades, the typical family home has remained largely unchanged. Families currently view smart homes as difficult to use with the effort involved in learning and running the home much higher than the value gained from the assistance. They do not believe a smart home can elegantly collaborate with a person, let alone function in the complex social structure of a family.

Our research focuses on dual-income families with school-age children. These families are ripe to become early smart home adopters due to both their extreme need for support and due to their rapid adoption and highly experimental use of current mobile communication technologies. A smart home could address needs for these families including:

Logistics: Negotiation, design, execution, and on-the-fly modification of complex transportation and childcare plans such as reacting to deviations caused by a sick child.
Assignments: Scheduling and monitoring of chores required for upcoming events such as laundering uniforms a day before a child's volleyball game.
Health: Management of health issues related to diet and exercise including goal setting, strategizing, and monitoring of progress.
Culture: Creation and maintenance of an individual familyÕs culture developed in the raising of children by their parents.

Research Questions

In taking a user-centered design approach to address how families interact with and control a smart home, we have identified three key research issues:

Feeling of Control: Dual-income families often feel out of control in trying to manage conflicting events and their related responsibilities. How can taking control of a smart home help them feel empowered to address the constant forces of chaos?
Language of intent: Families speak about technology in the home in terms of the activities, not devices. For example, they will say "play music," not "turn on the stereo." How can the interaction leverage this language of intent and outcome?
Identity construction: Family members construct both their individual and their family identity through their activities. For example, many parents add to their identity as mom or dad through the food they prepare for their children. How can a smart home support identity construction through home control so famliy members feel better about the roles they enact?

Carnegie Mellon | Human-Computer Interaction Institute