Someone Else’s Problem Fields and the IoT

PETRAS research conducted as part of the Adoption and Acceptability theme was recently presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The paper, titled Implications for Adoption, discusses how technology researchers tend to regard integration of the technologies they research into everyday life as someone else’s problem. Whilst there are a large variety of strategies to try and understand the future of technological adoption, which in this work are mapped onto Gartner’s hype cycle (see below), PETRAS researchers Joseph Lindley and Paul Coulton argue that the effects of these “someone else’s problem field” (a term borrowed from Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy) can be mitigated by integrating design fiction into research projects.

ADAPTED VERSION OF GARTNER’S HYPE CYCLE USED WITHIN THIS RESEARCH TO MAP HOW VARIOUS FUTURES TECHNIQUES RELATE TO ONE ANOTHER.

The paper can be downloaded here and the slide deck used to present the work is below.