Social button: a case system for social control-and-use of IoT devices in public spaces

Abstract

Sharing of public spaces constitutes a basis of modern urban life. Public spaces are often equipped with shared devices such as HVAC, lighting fixtures, speakers, or streaming TV channels to provide comfort and convenience to visitors to the space. However, many of these shared devices rarely allow visitors to control their operation, which severely limits their utility and fairness among visitors. Even when visitors do find ways to control them, the social hurdle of communicating and controlling them among strangers is often too high. This thesis focuses on the absence, the exclusiveness, and the social hurdle of controlling public IoT devices in these public spaces. It opens up an underexplored new direction of research: Social Control-and-Use of IoT devices, which has great potential and implications, but also high complexity and scale. To this end, this thesis proposes a novel socio-physical computing architecture, the Social Control-and-Use Architecture for IoT Devices. It serves as a systemic view and an effective tool to deal with the aforementioned complexity and intricacy of system design. Based upon the architecture, it also proposes Social Button, a first-of-a-kind system for the democratic and social control-and-use of IoT devices in public spaces. Social Button transforms an existing, exclusively controlled IoT device into a "true" public device. It allows visitors to the public space to instantly participate in democratic and collective control of the device in a way that enhances their satisfaction. In the process, it reflects the different operational policies of public spaces as well as consensus policies, creates control interfaces to support instant participation across different public spaces, and enables a myriad of off-the-shelf devices to be easily integrated with social control-and-use without modifying their implementation. The field deployment of the Social Button system in real-world public spaces demonstrates the coverage of the system and the acceptance of democratic collective control of devices by visitors to the spaces. Furthermore, this thesis presents an additional real-world deployment in two public spaces - a university auditorium and a cafeteria - to obtain detailed user experiences of the Social Button system as well as social control-and-use. Findings from the observational study include the user acceptance of social control-and-use, the importance of providing group awareness, the need for accessibility, immediacy, and inclusion in the application design, and the necessity of different social control-and-use policies and mechanisms for different spaces, devices, and visitors. Based on this, the future direction of social control-and-use of IoT devices in public spaces is discussed.