Academic site of Carl Ellis

@INPROCEEDINGS{Davidoff06principlesof,
    author = {Scott Davidoff and Min Kyung Lee and Charles Yiu and John Zimmerman and Anind K. Dey},
    title = {Principles of smart home control},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of Ubicomp 2006},
    year = {2006},
    publisher = {Springer}
}
        

Key Points

• Smart home control research has traditionally followed the end user programming route
• This leads to rigid specifications and families need flexibility

An ethnographic study was performed on 12 dual income families on routines and rituals. Dual income families were chosen as they are a rising demographic in America and many families are beginning to have more than two incomes. This demographic was interesting in the need for children to have extra curricular activities for development and as de facto babysitting services.

From in depth interviews and studies, dual income families are using technologies to help organise their lives around each other, and technology helps address the dynamic factor when one item cannot be fulfilled and issues cascade over a schedule. Traditional smart home controls tend to focus around iron wrought schedules and goals - i.e. The heating must be on between 3pm and 6pm, the lighting will turn off at 10pm. However, as the home is made up of routines which started off as improvisations, rigid schedules in family homes rarely apply. Each family had children with every changing schedules, which depended upon season, health, and age - so a system which necessitates control over a home must do so in a way which can help and augment the volatile nature of family routine.

There have been many cases of smart home prototype families feeling like a prisoner in their own home due to the rules which a system had been programmed with - this is the wrong approach and systems should stress flexibility at the utmost.

The paper outlines 7 rules for a smart home control system to follow:

1. Allow for the organic evolution of routines and plans.
2. Easily construct new behaviours and modify existing behaviours.
3. Understand periodic changes, exceptions, and improvisation.
4. Design for breakdowns.
5. Account for multiple, overlapping, and occasionally conflicting goals.
6. The home is more than a location.
7. Participate in the construction of family identity.