Finding Design Opportunities for Smartness in Consumer Packaged Goods

TL;DR

This paper explores how to integrate smart features into Consumer Packaged Goods by analyzing their practical use, aiming to develop design interventions that enable CPGs to collect usage data and offer additional services.

Contribution

It introduces a set of methods to analyze CPG usage practices, providing a foundation for designing IoT-enabled smart consumer goods.

Findings

Methods effectively analyze CPG use in practice

Identifies opportunities for IoT integration in CPGs

Demonstrates approach with cooking as a case study

Abstract

This study attempts to understand the use of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) in practice to obtain insights to develop design interventions that bring the CPGs into the Internet of Things. Our ultimate aim is to equip CPGs with a layer of smartness so that CPGs could collect information about their use and provide extra services and functionalities. With a practice perspective we developed an assemblage of methods to analyze and represent how people use CPGs. We chose cooking as our practice case and use an auto-ethnographic data sample to demonstrate the application of our methods. Despite the early stage of our study, our methods provide ways to get an understanding of how CPGs are used in practice and an opening to establish opportunities for design interventions.