Who’s In Control?: Interactions In Multi-User Smart Homes Christine Geeng and Franziska Roesner Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington
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[email protected] ABSTRACT ACM Reference Format: Adoption of commercial smart home devices is rapidly in- Christine Geeng and Franziska Roesner. 2019. Who’s In Control?: creasing, allowing in-situ research in people’s homes. As Interactions In Multi-User Smart Homes. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May these technologies are deployed in shared spaces, we seek to 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. understand interactions among multiple people and devices https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300498 in a smart home. We conducted a mixed-methods study with 18 participants (primarily people who drive smart device 1 INTRODUCTION adoption in their homes) living in multi-user smart homes, Smart home devices and platforms—including the Amazon combining semi-structured interviews and experience sam- Echo, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, Philips Hue pling. Our findings surface tensions and cooperation among lights, Nest thermostats and cameras, and more—are becom- users in several phases of smart device use: device selection ing increasingly ubiquitous in the homes of end users. Unlike and installation, ordinary use, when the smart home does not the popular personal technologies of recent decades, like lap- work as expected, and over longer term use. We observe an tops and smartphones, smart home devices, when placed in outsized role of the person who installs devices in terms of a shared environment, become shared devices used by and selecting, controlling, and fixing them; negotiations between affecting multiple people.