1 Introduction
The Internet of Things is a dramatic and inspiring step ahead in distributed computing, but also in emotional and social computing. Trucks and factories that manage their own inventories, and share their data with other smart objects to optimize workloads and maintain themselves can make supply chains more reliable, and accessible to query. However, sensible objects pervading daily life can create new kinds of experiences and relationships between people and environments. In this paper, I reflect on the “Internet of Places” at personal-scale and community-scale [4]. We make our places, but they, in turn, make us.
2 Things and Places
The Internet of Things is an exciting vision of the not-to-distant future when many of the devices in our midst can exchange data and coordinate their operation. If you image any scenario in which useful data is or could be sensed, and then directly guide action, this is the Internet of Things. Autonomous vehicles constantly map and monitor the area immediately around them, interact with databases to calculate and update their routes, anticipate and plan for lane changes, turns, and other events, and improvise their operation for road hazards. Smart buildings monitor occupant presence, and adjust their subsystems, warming/cooling and lighting spaces that are occupied, and reducing energy directed to spaces that are not currently occupied. These are Internet of Things scenarios. Sensors that measure the temperature, moisture and chemistry of soil in a field to determine recommended planting and harvesting times, watering and soil enrichment regimes, and crop rotation would similarly be Internet of Things. Medical implants that report status and adjust their operation through interactions with medical systems outside the body would also be Internet of Things systems. The schema for Internet of Things systems is highly generative; pretty much every interaction could be envisioned as an Internet of Things scenario.
A key element in this vision is consideration of the amount of data and data handling that is relevant to actions, and technology affordances of pervasive Internet connectivity. Thus, various kinds of driver distraction problems plague human drivers, and have become key arguments for autonomous vehicles. Particular sensor systems, such as radar and video, and cloud services, such as maps and other databases, can be integrated, continuously synchronized, and support intelligent guidance that is completely reliable with respect to distractions that humans cannot resist.
Internet of Things systems will surely change the world. They already have. But it is plain that there are concerns that are not significantly addressed, or perhaps addressed at all, through alleviating the demands of data. For example, even if it were possible to closely monitor all relevant bodily concomitants of various experiences, like the emotions of love or experiences of fine food, no one alive would want to make these experiences faster and more accurate by augmenting them with sensors, decision making, and operational interventions, such as notifications.
One way to understand the social Internet of Things is as those aspects of Internet of Things scenarios that transcend issues of data and data handling. The era of Internet of Things entails more than powerful data management; it entails new sorts of interactions and experiences for people. In this view, social Internet of Things is a further layer of analysis required to understand Internet of Things. The distinction between place and location illustrates this. Places are different from locations in that place is constructed through interaction and experience. Thus, a street corner is always a location; the location can be fully characterized by data such as GPS coordinates, the names of the intersecting streets, driving directions, etc. But a street corner is only a place to the extent that someone has been there and experienced something. Characterizing that is more than a matter of data.
3 Jack’s Kitchen
Kellogg et al. [13] envisioned Jack’s Kitchen as a distributed object, responsibility-based infrastructure in which kitchen interactions are mediated by an ensemble of kitchen services, devices, objects, and supplies. The embodied kitchen, through the ensemble of its parts, is an integrated user interface for kitchen activities. This is an example of the smart home Internet of Things type: The refrigerator manages its inventory to ensure that milk is fresh, and that vegetables and meats will suffice for Jack’s next cooking project. The refrigerator shares data with the wine cellar to verify that wine to complement the meal is available. When Jack shops or cooks, inventories are updated. Jack can be notified of anticipated shopping needs, or can just have the kitchen coordinate with his grocery store.
There is a lot of data in a kitchen; for example, variety of food items in the refrigerator each are time sensitive, moving from fresh to spoiled along their individual time lines. Human attention and data processing can clearly be a bottleneck. In Jack’s Kitchen the various objects actively manage themselves, communicating their freshness constraints, but also creating a dynamic inventory dependencies and interactions. Jack’s kitchen suggests menus, things Jack likes to cook, and things that he ought to eat. And this relatively concrete inventory-oriented advice can enable further opportunistic interactions. Jack can learn about tastes and menu planning, and about nutrition management. He can track his diet against various longer-term objectives.
In the late 1980s, distributed object architectures were still developing, and encouraged such visions. Kellogg et al. focused on envisioning the potential utility of software objects defined by responsibilities they carry out within an implemented system. They offered the “Jack’s Kitchen” scenario as an alternative approach to what was then being called “cyberspace”. Most views of cyberspace had focused on rich and engaging display-mediated virtual reality experiences, including early conceptions of direct brain-computer connections, as explored in cyberpunk futurist works of that period [2]. The cyberspace of Jack’s Kitchen is not apprehended by the eyes (or brain tissues); it is not an experience the self is projected into. Instead, it leverages diverse interactions with connected physical things that surround the embodied self “making reality a cyberspace”.
Personal spaces, like one’s kitchen, are of great practical importance. But personal spaces are also significant emotionally to people in sheltering, in evoking meanings, and in providing settings for social interactions and human development. For example, in organizing Jack’s inventory of food items, the kitchen could motivate and guide Jack to explore and develop new cooking skills. In a sense, this is still a fairly simple example of the original data management motivation for Internet of Things: The combinatorics of his current food items, and strategies for optimally utilizing foods before they spoil, might not be something Jack would invest much time and effort in. But it easy for the kitchen to make a few suggestions, and doing so could fundamentally expand Jack’s insights and skills with respect to his own food.
Kitchens are often the central design feature, even the structural hub of homes. Friends and family tend to gather in kitchens. In modern life, food preparation, eating, and clean up comprise some of the social family time we still have. Just by managing the inventories and capacities, the kitchen could also enable richer social interactions. Thus, menus suggested to utilize food on hand, and to provide learning and development opportunities, also provide topics for family conversation and orientation for collaborative family projects. These could be modest in scope, such as discussing which wine to have with dinner. They could involve identifying and harmonizing menu items in the dinner. They could be more ambitious, such as helping two or more people coordinate the preparation of food items so that everything is ready at the same time. The kitchen might sense Jack’s partner and children to more precisely suggest, organize, and support joint kitchen projects, and alert family members in other parts of the home, or in the yard outside, that dinner is ready.
4 Past, Present and Future Cohabitation
The kitchen and other spots in our personal living space materialize aspects of what it means to be home. Beyond these places is the intimate public space community, more social, but in many senses no less personal to us [10, 15].
Community places provide support for community projects as a kitchen supports our meal preparation and clean up. The park has its benches, views, places that children play, sounds. The Starbucks has coffee, people staring into laptops, and the din of a few conversations. People in community places can invite social openings through eye contact, smiles, and hellos. Today, they can also subscribe to location-sensitive services to make themselves visible and accessible for invitations to discuss community issues, share lunch, or take a short walk around the downtown shops.
Community is facilitated by common understandings and projects. These are rooted in myths and history, enacted and debated in the everyday now, and pointed toward a vision of the future. They are embodied in community places: the place where a sinkhole was that became the high school football field, the place where a barbershop has operated for 100 years, the place where people go to talk politics, the place where the town has proposed to create a pedestrian zone, and so forth.
Some of these places embody community heritage. History is inscribed deeply in them but it is also easy to miss their significance. The sinkhole is now gone. No one can see directly that it was ever there, though one might wonder why the level of the football field is somewhat lower than the level of the streets and sidewalks that surround it. Some of these places embody community practices; they are essential props for daily experiences. Conversations at the barbershop continue, though no one there knows how similar they are to the conversations a century ago. And some places embody the community’s future; their current locations and appearances are contingent, temporary. People who have read the town’s master plan might look at these places and see things that do not exist yet.
Location sensitive community apps can help articulate the meanings of places, and facilitate collaborative use of community space [5]. Thus, a person could walk around a local community space and get access to information about local places through the location sensing of a mobile device. In this type of design, the places themselves do not carry out computations or literally hold data, rather their geospatial coordinates are recognized by other devices, such as smartphones, and serve as keys for accessing data and interactions (e.g., [1, 7, 14]). However, from the standpoint of human experience, information and activities that pertain to a location, and are enabled by being at that location, can contribute directly to the meaning of the location.
Our design, Lost State College [8] provided place-based access to old photographic images and textual information we obtained from local historians describing what had happened at a collection of significant sites of local history; users could access these locations by being there, and engage in a variety of social media interactions to acknowledge and elaborate the meanings of the places. Thus, we combined the ideas of allowing places to speak for themselves and of allowing visitors to react, elaborate and develop the information comprising the places in order to make the curation of local heritage into an ongoing and open community project.
Our experience with the use of Lost State College focuses on 32 town residents who used the app for about an hour and were then interviewed. We found that people who had resided in the community for more than 4 years were more likely to contribute content to places, including both textual comments and photographs. The content contributed tended to be reports of personal experiences with various places and personal reflections on the significance of places. People who were new to the community, residing there for less than a year, were significantly less likely to post personal content, comments and photographs, but they were just as likely to view user comments and photos as more established residents. This suggests that making personal meanings of community places more visible can quickly be appreciated and utilized by new residents.
In interviews, people who used Lost State College expressed surprise and excitement about the history of particular community places. For example, one place consisted of a small sculpture of the members of a pig family. The sculpture commemorates the early history of the town when farm animals were permitted to roam. It dates to 1896, when the people of the town looked back to their rural origins nostalgically. Most participants were already aware of this sculpture, but few had a specific idea of its meaning. They were quite engaged to learn some details about its history while standing there with the pigs.
For places that had changed dramatically, people were intrigued to imagine life in the town at an earlier time; for example, when the site of the current football field was a sinkhole used as a dump. Places that had persisted in their role for many years, such as the Hotel State College and the barbershop, evoked reverence. For these places people were especially interested in studying the old photographs: “I love the long history and also food” (hotel); “wow this is cool that they keep it original!” (barbershop). Participants commented on how places had changed, and how people in the places had changed. They were surprised by what had happened in the past in places they walked by every day. One person said that made him feel greater pride in the community to more directly appreciate its past place by place.
At about the time, we were experimenting with Lost State College, we also we engaged in studying the town’s master plan process. This is a serious of envisioning how the town could develop through the next decade. The process results in architectural models and plans, sketches and drawings, and digital images of future streets, sidewalks and buildings. At the municipal level, citizen participation is critical to legitimizing public plans and initiatives; the town invests enormous and continuous effort in attracting, involving, and listening to citizen perspectives [12]. In the master plan process a series of formal presentations, and interactive sessions with models and other design artifacts was carried out. Although some spirited and productive conversations occurred, attendance was fairly low, often consisting mostly the same reliable group of residents. Most residents were not even aware that this process was going forward. Making sense of the many architectural drawings and reviewing the substantial planning documents are quite significant tasks for anyone who is not trained and does not regularly practice those tasks. Our partners in the local government wanted more citizen input.
To begin to explore this problem, we created Future State College [6]. This design is analogous to Lost State College, but presented imagery of what places in the town would look like in the future, based upon the town’s master plan, and invited people to comment. For example, one block of a central street in the town was planned to be converted to a pedestrian zone, with much wider walking areas and more extensive tree planting. A person using Future State College could walk in the one-block area and see the digital modeling and environment for the pedestrian zone. The user would be queried about this design direction, and the specific plan for achieving it.
Our hypothesis was that this sort of focused interaction would be both more engaging, in that the user could directly compare the current reality to an element of the master plan, and also more manageable, in that the scope of the interaction was limited to just a part of the whole master plan. Future State College asked people to focus on a specific design question instead of posing the vast and somewhat amorphous question of how they felt about the whole master plan.
Our implementation and study of Future State College was limited to elements of the master plan in a 2-block region of one central street in the town. Citizens were excited to experience the municipal master plan, and liked experiencing it and commenting on it at the same time. This is important in that participation or even awareness of the municipal master plan process is extremely rare.
We have also explored design concepts for using location sensitive services to make fellow community members more accessible to one another. The basic idea is that community places can mediate human encounters and interactions: If you and I are near the same place, then we are near one another, and might be able to exploit that proximity, participating in a joint community project. For example, Community Animator allowed citizens to join discussions of community issues with others interested in those issues, who were also physically nearby [6]. It lowered the bar for people to become community animators, engaging themselves and others in “spontaneous” community discussions. The idea for the app was to make every community place into a “third place”, in Oldenburg’s [15] sense.
Mobile Timebanking [9] is a similar approach focused on exchanging and pooling effort, rather than sharing conversation and discussion. In timebanking, people offer to do simple things for others and invite others to do things for them, such as giving/receiving lessons and carrying out domestic chores, or invite others to join them in simple activities such as dog walking, eating lunch, taking a walk or engaging in other physical activity. These interactions are valued by the time required to engage in them (hence, timebanking). Mobile timebanking emphasizes service exchanges and collaborations in the immediate spatial vicinity and timeframe. Community Animator and Mobile Timebanking are similar to services like Meetup, but are more real-time and opportunistic than planned in advance, and do not have central leadership. Both have the concept of leveraging co-location in community places. People who tried these interactions reported the formation of new ties, connections to others in the community they might never have encountered.
5 Sociotechnical Change
The integrated data infrastructures of the Internet of Things entail a social Internet of Things. They can enable richer interactions and experiences in personal, family, and community places. They can provide new possibilities for human development and social engagement. Sociotechnical change is never simple though. Concomitant with new affordances and opportunities, the Internet of Places may reshape aspects of life that we value and need. As we go forward “making reality a cyberspace”, we should remain mindful that every inspiring vision also entrains downsides. Indeed, the cyberpunk reworking of cyberspace in the early 1990s wound up basically dystopian.
Consider security issues. Easy and pervasive access to things, and among the things that help constitute a place, is essential to the visioning for Jack’s Kitchen and Lost/Future State College. If such interactions require too much security configuration, or real-time protocol, they will be much less compelling to people. They will enrich places less effectively. The places will seem more like a bank than a kitchen, more like the workplace than the neighborhood. Yet Internet of Things systems that are more open will present a wide assortment of “weakest links” for intrusions. Indeed, security challenges is one of the primary contemporary discourses of the Internet of Things [11].
The enhanced interactions and experiences of Jack’s Kitchen change what it means to be a kitchen and to prepare one’s food. Such places become agentive. They do not merely store materials that enable activities; they do not merely evoke human memories. By integrating and organizing data about the materials and activities, the kitchen provides richer interactions for people, as Kellogg et al. emphasized in their slogan “making reality a cyberspace”. But this also changes the relationship of people to their kitchens. The kitchen does not merely evoke memories, and store food, it notifies and recommends things to consider and do. It is possible that people would be both stimulated and undermined by places like Jack’s Kitchen, for example, they might learn new techniques and preparations, but lose some existing capacity for improvising meal with a couple unorthodox substitutions. Similarly, people might lose some of their amazing place-based memory skills if their places reliably remind them of what would have otherwise been cued recall.
Recent developments in autonomous vehicles have reawakened discussion of how automation can undermine human cognition by supporting it. For example, there is evidence that autopilots and even programming tools undermine the human skills they are designed to support [3]. Downsides of automation are debatable also though. If autopilots and programming tools reliably enhance our performance, and are always available, it does not make sense to insist on being limited by human limitations. Perhaps the same should be said for food improvisation and spatial memories.
Family life and community life may become more accessible in the world of Internet of Places. Newcomers, peripheral members, and children may more easily come to know the family, the home, the neighborhood, both its places and the experiences, interactions and activities that give those places their meaning, more quickly and easily than now. This could be a good thing in that one of the traditional dysfunctions of intimate human social arrangements is the time and effort required to initial and maintain them. It’s quite hard to become a family member or a community memory, and this encourages not bothering to do it.
On the other hand, public backtalk directly from the objects of personal places might demystify them too easily, and perhaps too superficially, thereby attenuate the experience of coming to know, moving closer, and so forth. This could undermine the subtlety with which we understand people and places, and the agency and responsibility we feel and exercise in coming to know. Psychology research has shown in many ways that people are attracted to, attend to, and are stimulated by experiences of moderate complexity. Many rich and rewarding experiences in the world as we know it now require us to do some intellectual and perceptual work in order to enjoy fully. Of course, making the kitchen a bit more transparent and responsive to the cook, and the neighborhood more aware of its past and future, does not remove all complexity. It may remove just enough to enable more cooks and neighbors.
Another consequence might be enhanced mindfulness. Enriching various places with signature experiences, memories, issues and discussions, and plans for the future would make it harder to turn off attention, to be inert as to where one is. It is definitely a good thing in many respects to enable a more mindful human experience, a way of living in which one is more aware of one’s own thoughts and feelings moment-by-moment, more aware of others, and just awake to life. More specifically, Internet of Places might make us more mindful of our friends, loved ones, neighbors, homes, neighborhoods, and communities, more aware of the now-invisible personal narratives and currents of emotion that constitute our local places. Greater engagement and awareness of family and neighborhood is a finger in the dyke of contemporary isolation [16].
But here too there can be a downside. No matter how rewarding it is to be socially engaged and mindful, sometimes people want to disengage and turn off. Places that are responsive and agentive might easily intrude on human solitude, on the right to be left alone. The quiet of the kitchen and the anonymity of the street are also places to be alone, to psychologically recharge through solitude.
These tradeoffs are grist and guidance for designers of the social Internet of Things. As in most design spaces, we can identify some dimensions of concern, but we do not know in detail how these dimensions would work in detail for an Internet of Places world, how they might interact, and how people would appropriate and transform them through use. The social Internet of Things emphasizes both the possible social concomitants of Internet of Things infrastructures, but also the constructive processes through which the Internet of Things will become socially embodied.
Acknowledgements
I thank my collaborators Kyungsik Han, Wendy Kellogg, Jess Kropczynski, Patrick Shih, John Richards, and Mary Beth Rosson. IBM and the US National Science Foundation supported this work.