In this paper we suggest a design research method for eliciting affordances and new meanings for Smart Objects in the Internet of Things Era. After an introduction to the topic and the description of some open issues, we propose to adopt a Critical Design approach, where the role of Ambiguity is twofold: on the one hand, it is the objective of the observation for defining a set of ambiguous objects or affordances; on the other hand, it is the result of a design conceptualization of smart objects aiming at provoking cognitive dissonance and finalized to understand people adaptation processes and behaviors.

1. Roma, 27 October 2014
Eliciting affordances for Smart Objects in IoT Era
Assunta Matassa, Rossana Simeoni

2. 01
Affordances
properties as 'natural elements' existing in
objects and which help people to interact
with the objects themselves.
Gibson, J. J. (2013). The ecological approach to visual perception. Psychology Press.!
Norman D., (1988). The Design of Everyday Things. Doubleday.!
Norman, D., (1999). Affordances, Conventions and Design. Interactions 6 (3), 38–42.!

3. !
!
!
!
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We define two kind of affordances:!
!
✤ Cognitive affordance is associated with semantics or meaning of artefacts. It is
help with a priori knowledge;!
✤ Physical affordance is a design features that helps, aids, supports enables doing
something physically.

4. Internet of Things opens a new opportunities in exploiting objects’ properties. !
The evolution is going in the direction of changing the shape and the appearance of
objects augmenting their natural function with something new.

5. Smart Objects
goes beyond what its aspect shows and what people can image, combining
knowledge and insights derived from the original physical object.!
!
!

6. The impossibility of establishing a clear connection between objects and functionalities
could become a threat for humans, since they are missing their innate ability to
understand what they can do only based on their knowledge and perception of the
surrounding context.!

7. 01
Cognitive
dissonance
The distance between physical affordance, object property suggesting
interaction, and cognitive affordance, !
the way people perceive how they could interact with object, can be
formalized using psychological definition of !
cognitive dissonance.!
Cognitive Dissonance is the perceived inconsistency between knowledge,
feelings and behaviour establishes an inner state of discomfort - cognitive
dissonance - that people try to reduce.

8. Mind the gap…

9. PAST!
In order to obtain innovative services, we
tried to combine the power of a traditional
book with the capabilities offered by new
technologies.

10. 01
NOW!
!
The final result conceptualises a new
smart book which integrates the
advanced technology of digital books
with the affordances of physical books to
facilitate people’s information revisiting
process.!
!
Using a top-projector to create digital
content on a blank paper book.!
!
!
!
The aim is to generate a natural reading
experience.!
Zhao, Y., Qin, Y., Liu, Y., Liu, S., Zhang, T., & Shi, Y. (2014, February). QOOK: enhancing information revisitation for active reading with a paper book. In Proceedings of the 8th
International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (pp. 125-132). ACM.

11. This project can be a good example of blindness behind !
this process:!
the result appears as something very ambiguous for users because the
attention focus on the introduction !
of !
tradition affordances in a smart object.

12. How ambiguity could support the design process in IoT Era?

13. 01
Ambiguity
could represent a source of
innovation and creativity to
support the development of a
good design and keep the
attention on users' behaviour and
needs.
Gaver, W., Beaver, J., and Benford, S. (2003). Ambiguity as a resource for design. In Proc. of!
the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, NY,!
USA, 233.!

14. We intend to exploit the lack of clear principles for eliciting
affordances or new meanings in smart objects by suggesting
a design research method, on top of !
the critical design approach.

15. Critical Design
In contrast with traditional design that reinforce the status quo and the
pre-existing situation, critical design uses speculative design proposals
to challenge the narrow assumptions, preconditions and stimulates the
reflection about the role of object in everyday life.!
!
!
Critical design as a new frontier for destroy!
and rebuild objects and behaviours.
Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2007). Critical Design FAQ. Retrieved September 1, 2012.!
Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., & Stolterman, E. (2014, April). Reading critical designs: supporting reasoned interpretations of critical design. In Proc. 32nd ACM Conf. on Human
factors in computing systems (pp. 1951-1960).

16. Setting up
an experiment

17. Step one
✤ Define a set of everyday objects and then observe which way people interact with
them, how they adopt affordances and how they apply different meaning while getting
in touch with them. !
✤ Using ethnography, the aim is to understand how affordances are already in use, the
smart objects in the “context of use" and highlight the existing interrelationships
between users and objects, and users and users with smart objects.
Blomberg, J., Giacomi, J., Mosher, A., & Swenton-Wall, P. Ethnographic Field Methods and Their Relation to Design. In D. Dchuler and A. Namioka (Eds.) Participatory Design
Principles and Practices. Erlbaum: New Jersey, 1993.

18. Step two
✤ We propose “in the wild” a set of smart objects, strictly related to the objects of the
previous step, containing ambiguity in meaning and affordances and then observe the
‘adaptive behaviour’ that people act as natural consequences of a state of cognitive
dissonance.!
✤ The aim is to understand the new meaning of smart object. We are encouraged to
understand how traditional affordance are in use in smart object, how people underline
new kind of affordances.
Chamberlain, A; Crabtree, A; Rodden, T; Jones, M; Rogers, Y; (2012) Research in the wild: Understanding 'in the wild' approaches to design and development. In: Proceedings of the
Designing Interactive Systems Conference, DIS '12. (pp. 795 - 796).

19. Thank you for your attention!
Assunta Matassa!
matassa@di.unito.it
Rossana Simeoni!
rossana.simeoni@telecomitalia.it