Lindley, Joseph Galen and Coulton, Paul (2017) On the Internet Everybody Knows You’re a Whatchamacallit (or a Thing). In: CHI 2017 Workshop, 2017-05-062017-05-06.
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Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) is fed by, and feeds into, flowing data streams. Through these flows, servers, sensors, humans and alike are networked together, data and networks mediating between physical and digital realms. ‘Things’ of all types, toys, lights and kettles, are tangible. On-view-but-unheard, they do their jobs. All the while, in the unseen digital domain, data flow, gush, and bubble, for the most part imperceptible to the human contingent of the allencompassing menagerie of stuff. Here in the kingdom of TCP/IP, the atmosphere is thick, packets of intermachine chatter commute back and forth around the network stacks, a tidal race of datagrams pulsate, whilst somewhere - far away? - a 2D image is painted on a 3D screen. ‘Connected!’ Chirps the dialog box. The poetic tension betwixt an apparent calm in the physical world, and an obscured complexity in the digital otherworld, sets the scene for the argument we present in this paper: The IoT’s objects, entities, or stuff makes up constellations; Human Centered Design methods are constrained by IoT constellations’ complexity and multiplicity; by building from Object Orientated Ontology, IoT designers may cast multiple data, devices, corporations, and humans as equally significant ‘actants’ in a flat ontology. Here we pose this argument and propose ways to explore it.