The home is becoming a complex and hard to manage collection of computers and digital lifestyle devices. The work to setup and maintain a network of digital living devices in the home is similar to the work of IT professionals. Indeed the growing complexity of interconnected digital devices results in more and more time spent solving problems with those devices and their configurations, an important part of computer use that we call "IT@Home". This workshop explores the complexity of framing the right problems, methods for studying those problems, and designing to support users' IT@Home.
Home networking continues to expand into a collection of computers and networked devices that are becoming more complex to setup and manage. Research indicated that new techniques were needed to help people set up a secure home network. The techniques should satisfy the expectations of advanced users, without requiring technical knowledge on the part of novice users. A central design theme influenced the software solution: If a networking expert was advising a user on how to set up, configure, and secure a home network, what would this person tell the user to do?. In this case study, insights about creating a new home networking program to solve the challenges are discussed. Results indicated animations, good default settings and a network map increased the user success rate for network setup.
We propose a cooking system that operates in an open environment. The system cooks a meal by pouring various ingredients into a boiling pot on an induction heating cooker and adjusts the heating strength according to the user's instructions. We then describe how the system incorporates robotic- and human-specific elements in a shared workspace so as to achieve a cooperative rudimentary cooking capability. First, we use small mobile robots instead of built-in arms to save space, improve flexibility and increase safety. Second, we use detachable visual markers to allow the user to easily configure the real-world environment. Third, we provide a graphical user interface to display detailed cooking instructions to the user. We hope insights obtained in this experiment will be useful for the design of other household systems in the future.