We live in an increasingly connected society, and technology plays a vital part in it. The impact of its social transformation can be seen across many facets of everyday life, including how people relate to others and the environment, as well as how people perceive themselves, their needs and emotions. This assumption led researchers to investigate the need of educating young generations to a reflective attitude toward technology and its impact on society. This paper reports on a study with IoTgo, an end-user development design toolkit that helps young generations to become active protagonists in the design of inclusive smart things, reflecting deeply on the pros and cons of technology in use in their everyday life. Initial results of the study show how design with IoTgo toolkit can lead youth to critically reflect on the design and use of technology in the form of smart things.
In recent years, researchers have started investigating the negative efects which the excessive use of technology can have on people’s well-being and social relations. Studies suggest that smart devices and social networks can in fact negatively impact attention [1, 2, 3], mental health [4, 5], and even the sense of connection with others or the surrounding environment [6, 7].
In response to such issues, researchers have begun to reconsider the role technology plays in their daily lives. This has resulted in a new focus of research on well-being, often referred to as digital well-being, which refers to the idea of well-being of the human being within an information society or, more generally, to the influence that technologies have on the level of mental and social well-being of the individual [8].
But digital well-being can also encompass increasing user awareness of not only the cons of technology but also of the multiple pros that adequate and responsible technology use can provide, e.g., inclusiveness. This goal is not immediate to be achieved, it needs a new mindset nEvelop-O
Morra); https://github.com/rizMehdi/ (M. Rizvi)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). to be formed, and that can be done by educating the younger generation. As also argued by De Russis et al., educating people and bringing the notion of digital well-being into schools is necessary [9]. Designing technology with the younger generation, in particular, and reflecting through design with them can help promote such a critical stance [10].
The use of appropriate design toolkits for young generations can engage them and foster their critical reflections on technology. Particularly, toolkits for the design of smart things enhanced with Internet of Things (IoT) technologies could encourage deeper reflection as IoT smart things and sensors that collect or exchange data on human behaviors have the potential to have a significant impact on social and individual digital well-being.
Numerous design toolkits employ cards and game boards to help end users ideate IoTconnected smart things [11, 12, 13]. In order to ofer more flexibility, many of these toolkits are not tied to specific physical devices for input or output. However, while such a strategy aids in the open-ended generation of ideas, the risk is that end-users may generate ideas that are not feasible for implementation due to a lack of supporting electronic devices or the programming expertise required to create working prototypes [14, 15].
In line with the goal of promoting responsible design education as a key to pursuing digital social well-being, this paper reports on a study conducted with a phygital toolkit, IoTgo, and the IoTgo method for designing with non-expert end-users. The method guides non-experts through the process of ideating, conceptualizing, programming, testing, and reflecting on the design of IoT-connected smart things. The toolkit helps the end users in quickly creating functioning prototypes of their ideas, leaving them more time for individual and group reflections on their design choices.
Being a phygital toolkit, IoTgo has various paper-based, software and hardware tools. The paper-based tools of IoTgo include decks of cards. These cards help users explore what smart things are meant for. For example challenge cards to explore the context with a challenging situation, persona card to see for whom the smart things is meant for, and for which environment (environment card), and what goals it has (missions card). Moreover, the card-based tools guide them to make things smart by means of physical inputs (e.g., tilt sensors) and outputs (e.g., LEDs), represented by input and output cards respectively, and by interconnecting them via peer-to-peer IoT communication.
The hardware and software tools of IoTgo include tools for supporting the programming of smart-thing ideas geared towards a specific design challenge. The generated programs follow specific programming patterns relevant to the physical nature of the smart things and are easy to follow and modify by non-experts.These tools include a physical scanner for IoTgo cards and a companion web app. Together, they automatically generate programs (available in Python, Javascript and Makecode) from the cards placed on the IoTgo boards. If needed, the web-app of IoTgo also enables its users to rapidly select diferent input and output combinations without the physical scanner to generate programs. The generated programs can either be directly downloaded to hardware such as Micro:bits or modified in programming environments like MakeCode before downloading to Micro:bits. See Fig. 1.
The study was held in the computer room of the school and organized along three days in November 2021. Participants were from a class of 24, 17 − 18 year-old students in the second last year (overall 12th grade of schooling) at a technical high school near Milan, Italy. The purpose of the study was to engage and make younger generation reflect through design. Teachers and researchers decided that the main design challenge, as specified in the IoTgo challenge card, should be social digital well-being with a focus on inclusiveness. Similarly, the class’s school was chosen as the design context, and tasks for the design challenge were assigned to pairs of students at random. Instead, it was up to the students to choose something to make smart. Before starting the activity, students explored how diferent input and outputs work, and learned about smart things in general.
Data on participants’ reflections on smart-thing design were collected as following. Each participant was given a post-questionnaire to measure their understanding of design for social digital well-being. It included the again-and-again survey originating from the Fun Toolkit [16], as well an open-format question that challenged participants to create new missions for creating new smart things. The toolkit itself contained several reflections lenses with questions from various perspectives such as relevance and safety. Thematic analysis was performed on the interview data with teachers in order to triangulate the other data regarding what reflections emerge from design for social digital well-being.
Except for two, the missions indicated by students in their questionnaire replies for future smart objects were all connected to social digital well-being. This result shows that the design experience for social digital well-being had an influence on the majority of participants, who chose to continue creating for the same goal even after the experience.
Except for one, all students responded to relevance and safety reflection questions, indicating the ability to critically think about such issues and to go beyond simple yes/no replies or rephrasing questions.
Each group was asked to share their smart things with the entire class, teachers, and researchers, as well as explain the motivations that guided their design, in terms of potential benefits for their persona. Although this activity was not originally planned, students took advantage of the opportunity to discuss the meaning of responsible design for social digital well-being with their classmates and teachers, emphasizing aspects that could have a positive or negative impact on individuals, society, or the environment.
This study focuses on the IoTgo phygital toolkit, which organizes design for a purpose for inexperienced designers or programmers, in accordance with the purpose-based approach recently recommended by Cunningham [17]. Tasks include empathizing, ideating and conceptualizing, programming and prototyping, and reflecting. This is accomplished it in a tangible way, using gaming boards, cards, and hardware and software resources.
The initial findings suggest that students were able to critically reflect on design for social digital well-being by following the instructions given in the IoTgo toolkit. They could consider it from various perspectives (relevance, safety), as well as through spontaneously emerging reflection topics (accessibility, universal usability, social engagement, green sustainability). The research presented in this paper may be of interest to a variety of communities. As the toolkit is modular, it is easy to adapt to diferent context and communities. In the past, the toolkit has been used with children, teens, teacher, and professional artists. In the most recent iteration, the participants were responsible for more than just generating ideas, conceptualizing solutions based on given patterns, and programming them. In fact, the IoTgo design allowed them to socially interact “for the social good”, and critically reflect on smart technology for social digital well-being , and to consider how it can impact beyond individuals’ own well-being, e.g., [18].
The authors thank the students and teachers of ITELL “Gadda Rosselli” high school, Gallarate, Italy, for their participation. The authors acknowledge that the discussion and results reported in this paper originate from the complete and detailed results and discussion reported in a paper currently under review in a journal, with authors Rosella Gennari, Maristella Matera, Diego Morra and Mehdi Rizvi. The study is also reported in the paper by Gennari et al., accepted for publication at AVI2022 conference [19]. The work done was supported by the SNaP grant, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, and EMPATHY, funded by MIUR, PRIN call 2017, Italy. [1] E. Harmon, M. Mazmanian, Stories of the smartphone in everyday discourse: Conflict, tension & instability, in: Proceedings of SIGCHI Conf on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’13, ACM, NY, USA, 2013, p. 1051–1060. doi:10.1145/2470654.2466134. [2] P. David, J.-H. Kim, J. S. Brickman, W. Ran, C. M. Curtis, Mobile phone distraction while studying, New Media & Society 17 (2015) 1661–1679. doi:10.1177/1461444814531692. [3] K. Kushlev, J. Proulx, E. W. Dunn, ”silence your phones”: Smartphone notifications increase inattention and hyperactivity symptoms, in: Proceedings of CHI Conf on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’16, ACM, 2016. doi:10.1145/2858036.2858359. [4] J. Matar Boumosleh, D. Jaalouk, Depression, anxiety, and smartphone addiction in university students- a cross sectional study, PLOS ONE 12 (2017) 1–14. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0182239. [5] A. A. Alhassan, E. M. Alqadhib, N. W. Taha, R. A. Alahmari, M. Salam, A. F. Almutairi, The relationship between addiction to smartphone usage and depression among adults: a cross sectional study, BMC psychiatry 18 (2018) 1–8. [6] J. D. Elhai, J. C. Levine, R. D. Dvorak, B. J. Hall, Fear of missing out, need for touch, anxiety and depression are related to problematic smartphone use, Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016) 509–516. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.079. [7] R. J. Dwyer, K. Kushlev, E. W. Dunn, Smartphone use undermines enjoyment of face-toface social interactions, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 78 (2018) 233–239. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2017.10.007. [8] C. Burr, M. Taddeo, L. Floridi, The ethics of digital well-being: A thematic review, Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (2020) 2313–2343. doi:10.1007/s11948- 020- 00175- 8. [9] A. Monge Rofarello, L. De Russis, Coping with digital wellbeing in a multi-device world, in: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’21, ACM, NY, USA, 2021. doi:10.1145/3411764.3445076. [10] I. R. U. of Oulu University, Make-a-diference, http://interact.oulu.fi/mad, 2022. [11] S. Mora, F. Gianni, M. Divitini, Tiles: A card-based ideation toolkit for the internet of things, in: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, DIS ’17, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2017, pp. 587–598. doi:10.1145/3064663.3064699. [12] M. Dibitonto, F. Tazzi, K. Leszczynska, C. M. Medaglia, The IoT Design Deck: A Tool for the Co-design of Connected Products, in: Advances in Usability and User Experience, Springer, Cham, 2018, pp. 217–227. [13] R. Brito, P. Houghton, Iot service kit, http://iotservicekit.com, 2017. Accessed: 2019-09-06. [14] R. Gennari, M. Matera, A. Melonio, M. Rizvi, E. Roumelioti, Reflection and awareness in the design process: children ideating, programming and prototyping smart objects, Multimedia Tools and Applications 80 (2021) 34909–34932. [15] A. Melonio, M. Rizvi, E. Roumelioti, A. De Angeli, R. Gennari, M. Matera, Children’s beliefs and understanding of smart objects: An exploratory study, in: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, 2020, pp. 1–8. [16] J. C. Read, S. MacFarlane, Using the fun toolkit and other survey methods to gather opinions in child computer interaction, in: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Interaction Design and Children, IDC ’06, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2006, p. 81–88. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/1139073.1139096. doi:10.1145/1139073.1139096. [17] K. Cunningham, Purpose-first programming: A programming learning approach for learners who care most about what code achieves, in: ACM Conf on International Computing Education Research, ICER ’20, 2020, p. 348–349. doi:10.1145/3372782.3407102. [18] F. Schaber, Socially responsible design: breadline shoes for children in India., in: When Design Education and Design Research Meet: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education, Westbury: Institution of Engineering Designers, 2010, pp. 352–357. [19] R. Gennari, M. Matera, D. Morra, F. Puglisi, M. Rizvi, Designing for digital social well-being: a diferent and inclusive perspective, in: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, AVI, 2022.