IoT exploration space

• 8-20 people
• 1 day
• no technical background required
• designing connected objects

Connected objects gather data from their surroundings and act on it. Whoever designs such things has a hand in deciding how people live in a city. This exploratory space opens that decision to people who are not engineers.

In the smart city discourse, residents usually appear as trained users, rarely as designers. That is a convention, not a necessity. Someone who uses a street every day knows things about it that appear in no requirements list.

The barrier is real: without knowledge of electronics, network protocols or device configuration it is hard to take part. So a method is needed that does not presuppose that knowledge. This is what the card method provides. It makes the building blocks of connected devices tangible without anyone having to read a data sheet.

Participation here does not mean being consulted about a finished design. It means working on the design before it is settled.

The group picks a scenario and a persona. The persona is the archetype of a user, with a name, needs and tasks; it can also stand for a group, such as older people or construction workers. The process does not start without a persona. That is deliberate: the question of who something is for should not be added later.

The group then picks everyday objects and extends them with sensors, services, interactions and responses. A bin with a tilt sensor that reports when it falls over, and with an air sensor that triggers in the heat. Further cards connect several devices into one behaviour.

Finally, criteria cards call the group’s thinking back into question. The group looks at its own idea from an outside perspective and reworks it. Each concept is sketched on a storyboard and presented in two minutes.

The element of chance in the cards is part of the method. It keeps the space open and stops the group from reaching straight for the idea it already had.

Two outcomes, and they differ.

One is appropriation. Afterwards the group understands how connected devices work, what they record and what questions that raises. This understanding is built together, not delivered in a talk. It holds whether or not anything is ever built.

The other is project development. Several worked-out ideas come out of the day. If applications are to follow, a second phase begins: the paper concept becomes a prototype with sensors and hardware, against which the idea can be tested.

Settle beforehand which of the two outcomes counts. Both are legitimate, but they lead to different agreements about what happens after the day.

No technical background. I bring the cards and the board, adapted to the group.

What the group should bring is local knowledge: whoever uses a street, a building or a working routine every day has more to contribute to this day than someone who knows the technology.

Eight to twenty people. Fewer than eight makes the small groups too thin; more than twenty can no longer be presented and discussed in a single day.

The cards and the board are published under CC BY-SA 4.0. You can download them, print them and work with them without me. The card backs are for double-sided printing.

German

• Cards (PDF, 12 MB)
• Card backs (PDF, 420 kB)
• Board (PDF, 2.7 MB)

English

• Cards (PDF, 7.2 MB)
• Board (PDF, 2.6 MB)
• Booklet (PDF, 360 kB)

The Tiles IoT Toolkit was developed at NTNU Trondheim and is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. It consists of 153 cards in nine decks, plus a game board. Each deck contains one blank card so the group can add its own sensors, objects or personas.

I bring an adapted deck, in German-speaking contexts in German, and adapt the cards to the group. The standard cards work just as well. Cards and board are freely available; you can work with them without me.

Where the expertise and the picture are already in place. Where it is settled what is to be built, generating ideas is a detour.

Too much structure does as much harm as too little. Some groups find the constraints of the cards obstructive, others want more of them. This can be adjusted, but it cannot be known in advance.

And the method works under time pressure. Anyone who copes badly with that contributes less in this format than they otherwise would.