IoT in the wild: what negotiating public deployments can tell us about the state of the Internet of Things

• Published in: IET Conference Proceedings
• Main Authors: Hay, D, Buyuklieva, B, Daothong, J, Edmonds, B, Hudson-Smith, A, Milton, R, Wood, J
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Stevenage The Institution of Engineering & Technology 28.03.2018
• Subjects: Economic conditions; Internet of Things; User groups
• ISBN: 1785618431; 9781785618437
• DOI: 10.1049/cp.2018.0017

The promise of IoT technologies is such that they represent as big a social and economic change as the invention of the Internet itself. From the way people consume media in their homes to structural changes in global employment through improved automation, IoT has the potential to touch all aspects of peoples everyday lives at domestic, national, and international scales. The size of this change and the unpredictability of the potential social effects of these technologies is precisely what makes research into them urgent, yet at the same time it is this scale and unpredictability that makes this research challenging to conduct. In the field of Human Computer Interaction, methodologies such as `in-the-wild' research, in which the emergent properties of a technology are discovered through the design and deployment of a device or system outside of the laboratory and in collaboration with the people with whom it is envisioned to be used by, have emerged to deal with some of these issues. Yet beyond the findings garnered through direct user engagement, negotiating an in-the-wild study is itself a challenging proposition: the needs of researchers, technology hosts, and potential user groups must be balanced, and the potential affordances of a technology are limited by their acceptability with these stakeholders. With reference to `Tales of the Park', a publicfacing IoT deployment developed in partnership with Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, this paper outlines some of the key points of negotiation that made the deployment possible, and contends that these indicate broader social anxieties about the future direction of the Internet of Things.