We took forward in a number of short design experiments. These allowed us to investigate themes and technologies before committing to final designs. Through these experiments, we refined our interests to produce the three Boundary Devices we developed as output from this phase of the project.

Workbook Three

We produced Workbook Three over a period of several months in order to open a wide design space for further exploration. Different sections dealt with tracking objects in the home, storage and display, links to the outside world, and imaginary extensions.

Using motion and location sensing to track object use.

For instance, we looked at various ways to track object usage via technologies extended from those developed by Equator partners. The results might be used to reconfigure devices, to find places to put them, or simply to draw attention to neglected possessions. These explorations led to further experiments with ultrasound tracking in the home.

Proposals exploring how to turn storage into display.

We also explored how objects are stored and displayed in the home, sensitising ourselves to the huge amount of the home’s space used for storage. Proposals here centred on a variety of techniques, for instance drawn from photography or cinema, for creating evocative landscapes from the home’s possessions.

Mass-produced objects link thousands of households.

The fact that many of our possessions are mass-produced links us to a world of other people who own the same things. Explorations on e-Bay, for instance, allowed us to find images of identical objects in different settings. We began to speculate about using the things we owned as ways of linking us to other places, perhaps through literal exchange. This line of speculation was taken forward in our ‘lamp-share’ explorations, and later became a major focus of the Curious Home experience.

Evidence for fictional extensions of the home could be created

A final line of exploration revolved around ideas of creating imaginary extensions of the home. These might be hinted at through evidence such as fictional phone bills, or through devices or systems meant to create hints of other spaces. Some of these ideas are also reflected by later work on the Curious Home.

Lamp Share

Several design experiments explored some of the themes picked out by Workbook Three. For example, the workbook described how two members of the team exchanged bedside lamps for about ten days. This produced a surprisingly powerful and unsettling experience. Sharing an intimate part of the home with a strange appliance seemed to evoke their presence in an inappropriate place. At the same time, it spurred an imaginary visit to one’s own lamp, living in a bedroom you would never see. It was almost as if the lamps became avatars to be simultaneously protected and protected against (one team-mate’s partner refused to let the visiting lamp within three meters of the bed!).

Trading lamps was a surprisingly powerful experience.

We thought about developing this experience in several ways. A search on eBay revealed the same mass-produced objects being sold simultaneously. Perhaps a kind of object-exchange service could be arranged to allow people to send their possessions to experience different lands and to host visitor objects from far away. The visitors might be identical to one’s original possessions, but perhaps they would carry a strange aura from their homeland.

Identical objects and collections from eBay suggest that people could swap their possessions. The things would be the same, but they might bring with them an exotic new aura.

To build on this further, we decided to connect functionally equivalent devices electronically. Using the newly-developed ECT system and Bluetooth enabled Smart-Its, we linked together lamps owned by two of the team-mates. The system was arranged so that the average setting of the two switches controlled the level of both lamps. Turning up one lamp turned up both; turning down one turned both down. The effect was to enable mutual awareness of activity between the two households, but a form of awareness that had practical consequences, requiring negotiation, for both locations.

Lamps controlled by Bluetooth were linked together so that changing the level of one changed both, creating an awareness system with practical import.

Location Sensing

Our speculations in Workbook Three, combined with work from Equator ethnographers, sensitised us to flows of possessions in the household. We began to wonder if the movement of things through the home might not be indicative of larger issues. The way a coffee cup travels through the house – from cupboard to counter, from counter to bedroom, from bedroom to desk, and back to the kitchen – might be symptomatic of activities in the household. A previously active object that becomes increasingly disused over time might signal dangerous neglect. We decided to explore this issue further.

Workbook 3 speculated about the meanings of objects moving around the home.

Our explorations took varied forms. Working with Bristol’s ultrasonic tracking system, we set up several experiments in our own homes, tracing the movements of highly mobile objects such as remote controls and magazines, as well as objects that are apparently more static, like coffee tables. We were interested in the data that we could gather from these studies, and began devising ways to appropriate the information in order to build new applications. Our most ambitious plan was to use track the movement of a vacuum cleaner, and use the occlusion data from this tracking to construct 3D models of rooms.