Designing Low-Res Lighting Displays as Ambient Gateways to Smart Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) enabled through sensor-rich environments and smart devices allows us to collect and exchange vast quantities of data. The advent of new markets, such as the smart home sector, and movements, such as the quantified self, indicate the IoT's huge economic and social impact. With the increased availability of IoT services, it becomes important to enable users with intuitive mechanisms for accessing the gathered data. In this work, we present findings from an exploratory design case study, in which we deployed a low-res lighting display in three family households to visualize domestic energy performance data. Our study showed that the standalone lighting display was preferred over a commercially available web-based application. Further, we found that in two of the three households those participants, who did not use the mobile application before, became the main user of the display and actively engaged with the visualized data. The paper concludes with design implications for pervasive displays connected as ambient gateways to smart devices.