Designing Smart Objects In Everyday Life

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.

"The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Such objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful and intelligent manner. This book offers a critical assessment on smart design, together with methods and tools to deal with the challenges and opportunities presented. If design is concerned with creating purposeful interventions in everyday life, then how would the design of smart objects change to account for the animation and the 'personality' projected by the users? What range of competences, skills and expertise are needed to design smart objects in the everyday life?"--

Smart Design is an international collection of products that stand out for the excellence of their design. In a world where almost every product works as well as any other and technology is omnipotent, it is design that makes the difference. It is the work of designers to make sure the objects we work with, travel on, learn from and play with are easy to use, approachable, enjoyable and satisfying. Smart Design takes 24 examples of the world's best products and looks at the people behind each design, the challenges along the way, and how companies work with designers, whether individuals, global consultancies or corporate design teams, to create smart products. Designing a product is about usability, manufacturing, function and form. It is also about brand, emotion and technology. The role of the product designer is to pull these aspects together and combine individual creative brilliance with teamwork from experts in everything from physiology to electronics to create designs that not only work, but surprise and delight along the way.

It has been claimed that the natural sciences have abstracted for themselves a 'material world' set apart from human concerns, and social sciences, in their turn, constructed 'a world of actors devoid of things'. While a subject such as archaeology, by its very nature, takes objects into account, other disciplines, such as psychology, emphasize internal mental structures and other non-material issues. This book brings together a team of contributors from across the social sciences who have been taking 'things' more seriously to examine how people relate to objects. The contributors focus on every day objects and how these objects enter into our activities over the course of time. Using a combination of different theoretical approaches, including actor network theory, ecological psychology, cognitive linguistics and science and technology studies, the book argues against the standard notion of objects and their properties as inert and meaningless and argues for the need to understand the relations between people and objects in terms of process and change.

In Phase Media, James Ash theorizes how smart objects, understood as Internet-connected and sensor-enabled devices, are altering users' experience of their environment. Rather than networks connected by lines of transmission, smart objects generate phases, understood as space-times that modulate the spatio-temporal intelligibility of both humans and non-humans. Examining a range of objects and services from the Apple Watch to Nest Cam to Uber, Ash suggests that the modulation of spatio-temporal intelligibility is partly shaped by the commercial logics of the industries that design and manufacture smart objects, but can also exceed them. Drawing upon the work of Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon and Bruno Latour, Ash argues that smart objects have their own phase politics, which offer opportunities for new forms of public to emerge. Phase Media develops a conceptual vocabulary to contend that smart objects do more than just enabling a world of increased corporate control and surveillance, as they also provide the tools to expose and re-order the very logics and procedures that created them.

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious—even liberating—book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. In this entertaining and insightful analysis, cognitive scientist Don Norman hails excellence of design as the most important key to regaining the competitive edge in influencing consumer behavior. Now fully expanded and updated, with a new introduction by the author, The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how—and why—some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

How do common household items such as basic plastic house wares or high-tech digital cameras transform our daily lives? This title considers this question, from the design of products through to their use in the home. It looks at how everyday objects, ranging from screwdrivers to photo management software, are used on a practical level.