Theory and Design Considerations for the User Experience of Smart Environments

With the infusion of computation into workplaces and homes, various service settings, and everyday objects, scholars in human–computer interaction (HCI) and related domains have begun to consider the research and design implications not only of smart “things,” but of smart environments . Much of the work on smart environments to date has focused on smart homes; related work in HCI explores user values for smart homes, means of interacting with computation in smart homes (e.g., interfaces and agents), how to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders, and how to preserve user trust and autonomy. However, the smart environments of the future will not always fit the smart home mold of a coalescence of products that exist to automate and ease everyday tasks for the end users. They will be both user-focused and goal-focused, public and private, large and small, and ephemeral and long-lasting. It will benefit the field to look at smart environments as a unit of analysis—including what these different types of environments have in common and what they do not—from a systemic, user experience design-oriented view. In this survey article, we review prior research on smart environments and various related bodies of literature. Informed by our literature review, we articulate five lenses that distinguish different types of smart environments from one another. We then propose research directions for future work on this topic.