=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3172/short10
|storemode=property
|title=Enhancing Students' Critical Reflection on Smart Things Design Through an End-User Development Toolkit
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3172/short10.pdf
|volume=Vol-3172
|authors=Diego Morra,Mehdi Rizvi
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/avi/MorraR22
}}
==Enhancing Students' Critical Reflection on Smart Things Design Through an End-User Development Toolkit==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3172/short10.pdf
Enhancing Students’ Critical Reflection on Smart
Things Design Through an End-User Development
Toolkit
Diego Morra1,∗ , Mehdi Rizvi1
1
Politecnico di Milano, Via Ponzio, 34/5, Milan, Italy
Abstract
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.
Keywords
IoT, Toolkit, End Users, Inclusive Design, Prototyping and Programming
1. Introduction
In recent years, researchers have started investigating the negative effects 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
EMPATHY: 3rd International Workshop on Empowering People in Dealing with Internet of Things Ecosystems.
Workshop co-located with AVI 2022, June 06, 2022, Frascati, Rome, Italy.
*Corresponding author.
Envelope-Open diego.morra@polimi.it (D. Morra); syedmehdi.rizvi@polimi.it (M. Rizvi)
GLOBE https://www.linkedin.com/in/diegomorra/ (D. Morra); https://github.com/rizMehdi/ (M. Rizvi)
Orcid 0000-0001-7275-6219 (D. Morra); 0000-0001-8386-5779 (M. Rizvi)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
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].
2. Background
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 IoT-
connected smart things [11, 12, 13]. In order to offer 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].
3. IoTgo phygital toolkit
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 different input and output combinations without
Figure 1: A student programming a Micro:bit using the end-user development toolkit: IoTgo
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.
4. The Study
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 different 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.
5. Initial Results
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 re-
searchers, 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.
6. Conclusion
This study focuses on the IoTgo phygital toolkit, which organizes design for a purpose for inex-
perienced 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 different 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].
Acknowledgments
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.
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