Affiliation(s): Simon Fraser University
Abstract:
What happens when data are ubiquitous in our lives, our homes are completely networked, and information pertinent to decisions we make in daily life are virtually at our fingertips? The approach that hallmarked the first decades of the digital home has been to supply residents with an assortment of standalone apps, websites and social media for retrieving, monitoring and and analysing data from a plethora of sources, and to design specialised views that are particular to devices like tablets and phones. But this doesn’t work in an increasingly fluid and dynamic information landscape where information-driven decisions happen throughout the home in the course of daily life. New light technologies let us paint displays onto the surfaces and materials in our homes, embedding visualization capabilities into the very fabric of our living spaces, and extending the affordances of a display to the actual building envelope, appliances and furniture that comprise that home. Visualization has now become both a functional and an aesthetic consideration in how we design and use our living spaces: instead of the quaint, over-automated “Smart home” of the 1990s, we now have “informative homes” capable of receiving, capturing and communicating data right at the points, times and activities when we need it. Instead of getting regular but infrequent reports of our data (an energy bill, a school report card, the financial records of our building council), the informative home subscribes to data feeds and visualization services that can mash-up and slice the data into meaningful forms based on use and constraints specified by the resident. Architects are working with visualization researchers, municipal planners, and social scientists to explore how well-known principles of automated visualization design can transfer to this broader space, extending the notion of a display to include surface properties (e.g. a stainless steel fridge door), contexts of use (e.g. a kitchen backsplash, a social table) and aesthetic and affective constraints (the “persuasive meter”. )