Building change: Constructive design of smart domestic environments for goal achievement

This paper presents the constructive design research (CDR) of smart domestic environments comprised of smart home infrastructure, smart domestic artifacts and digital services. CDR is an approach that focuses on imagining futures and learning through the making and testing of prototypes to construct new knowledge about how people engage with the world. While the body of research on smart domestic environments includes a wealth of human-centered research, the use of CDR is marginal. Our work demonstrates how such a process engages residents in activities to imagine why people might value smart domestic environments and how they might want to interact with them. Through goal setting activities, paper prototyping, and field-testing of resident designed technology probes, we present use cases, design principles and experiential insights. After sharing these findings, we introduce the emergence of smart domestic environments as possessing persuasive, personified and artful qualities.