Thing Constellation Visualizer: Exploring Emergent Relationships of Everyday Objects

TL;DR

This paper introduces thingCV, an interactive visualization tool that helps designers explore emergent relationships among everyday objects in IoT ecosystems by combining data-driven patterns with human interpretation.

Contribution

The work presents a novel interactive tool, thingCV, that visualizes social networks of objects and supports perspective-changing design explorations in IoT contexts.

Findings

Designers actively identified interesting objects and clusters.

Participants projected social qualities onto objects and communities.

Exploration led to new insights and reinterpretations of object relationships.

Abstract

Designing future IoT ecosystems requires new approaches and perspectives to understand everyday practices. While researchers recognize the importance of understanding social aspects of everyday objects, limited studies have explored the possibilities of combining data-driven patterns with human interpretations to investigate emergent relationships among objects. This work presents Thing Constellation Visualizer (thingCV), a novel interactive tool for visualizing the social network of objects based on their co-occurrence as computed from a large collection of photos. ThingCV enables perspective-changing design explorations over the network of objects with scalable links. Two exploratory workshops were conducted to investigate how designers navigate and make sense of a network of objects through thingCV. The results of eight participants showed that designers were actively engaged in identifying interesting objects and their associated clusters of related objects. The designers projected social qualities onto the identified objects and their communities. Furthermore, the designers changed their perspectives to revisit familiar contexts and to generate new insights through the exploration process. This work contributes a novel approach to combining data-driven models with designerly interpretations of thing constellation towards More-Than Human-Centred Design of IoT ecosystems.