Socially-aware control of everyday appliances in urban spaces

Abstract

Everyday appliances form the basis of modern urban life. A myriad of appliances permeates all spaces of daily living, coming in various forms such as hair dryers, air conditioners, speakers, and coffee makers. Living without using such appliances is unthinkable. These appliances are inherently social--they physically influence their surrounding space and the people therein. However, today's design of everyday appliances is "socially ignorant"--they reflect only the owner's intention and the people nearby are often ignored. In this dissertation, I envision the opportunities in IoT and sensing technologies to revamp the mode of appliance control to be socially-aware. I explore the notion of socially-aware control by developing systems that transform everyday appliances into socially-aware ones. First, I present Social Appropriateness Guardian (SAG) towards mitigating the problem of appliance noise and consequent discomfort in densely-populated buildings. SAG is a system that provides a user of a noise-making appliance with an instant and situation-aware forecast of the potential discomforts the appliance will cause. As such, SAG allows the user of SAG-enabled appliances to avoid unwittingly inconveniencing their neighbors, thereby encouraging appliance control in a manner considerate to the community. The key challenge to realizing SAG lies in enabling the prediction of sound propagation of an appliance in a high-density building at minimal instrumentation cost and user burden. SAG addresses these challenges by piggybacking the burden of noise sampling in the everyday life of community members. The field deployment of SAG in offices and goshiwon shows the users' acceptance and that SAG helped the users to be aware of and considerate of others' discomforts. Second, I present Hivemind, a system that enables democratic collective control of an appliance installed in a public space. I present the new concept of influence-aware authorization–-the participants are dynamically granted the votership upon approaching an area of influence (AoI).