What can social sciences tell us about designing for the internet of things (IOT)? Imagine if you will that you have just discovered that some of your devices responsible for maintaining your health and wellbeing have been lying to you… They did it with good intentions; your scales were faking your weight loss and were in cahoots with your blood pressure monitor and step counter. They saw how happy you were when you felt like you were making progress so they decided to “help you” get to your goals faster. Your phone let you in on their little secret. What would you do? Ditch your phone? Reward your phone for dobbing them in? Get them all out of your life and start again, with dumb objects? Worse still, as a UX designer how are you going to deal with having to design for a world in which your products, objects and services will collaborate, communicate and share with each other. How can you create systems that not only react to human needs, but also potentially shape the behaviours of the people who are using them?

1. The social life
of the

3. Billions
50
40
30
20
10
0
2003 2008 2010 2015 2020
~6 “Things” Per Person
7.8
50
7.3
26
6.7
6.7

4. • Disconnected intelligence

5. • Disconnected intelligence
• Access to information

6. • Disconnected intelligence
• Access to information

14. What might that look like?

16. Children, the only
source of truth in
a dystopian future

17. “A truly smart product might do
something that we might not
understand or even disagree with”
– Usman Haque (via Rebaudengo)

18. • Actors
• Information
• Intelligence
• Action
• Encoded knowledge
Humans and things

19. We can tell more about a society or a group
of people from the relationships they have,
than the attributes of any individual member

20. Friends, Family, Work, UX Community,
Twitterverse, Government?

21. The social networks that can get things
done have higher social capital. This is
defined by the “texture” of the network

22. Hi!

24. Hi!

25. BENEFITS & DRAWBACKS

26. Echo chambers

27. Individual actors may have access to
more or less social capital depending on
where they are in the network

28. Brad Sue
Centrality & Bridges
Chuck

29. Dynamic relationships
Brad ?!

30. This is important because as humans, our
social networks have a massive impact on who
we are

31. Framingham heart study published 2008

32. Framingham heart study published 2007

33. 200,000 years of social evolution

34. No Idea !?

37. 1. The weather predictor
2. While you were away
3. The Button
4. Emergent complexity from simple rules
5. Cheating networks
6. The television says NO

38. The weather predictor
Outsourcing your umbrella reminder

39. The weather predictor

42. The weather predictor

43. The button
Outsourcing your diet

44. The button

45. Takeaway night

51. The button

53. 1. Trust is key

54. 2. Design for social context

55. 3. Humans like to feel in control

56. 1. Trust is key
2. Design for social context
3. Humans like to feel in control

57. Do you want to help me make decisions?
Do you want to make decisions for me?
Which decisions are worth taking away?

58. 50 Billion objects in 4 years time

59. “… there is a difference between
technologies that seek to augment
versus those that seek to replicate or
replace human processes”
– Dori Tunstall

60. They won’t behave how we
expect them to.
They will behave how we have
asked them to, with the goals we
as UX designers have set for
them.

61. “Nothing vast enters the life of
mortals without a curse”
– Sophocles