Design Process of Smart Home Product Service System (SH-PSS) in Indian Context

Designing for the smart home space is a challenge for design community because of the complexity of Internet of Things (IoT), which combines the tangible products and the intangible services and networks. Many IoT design methods exist to support design activities within this space. To that end, we have been interested in how smart home ideation design methods relate to each other along with user-centric design methods. Further, we invited the designers of smart homes products service system (SH-PSS) to a semi-structured interview and open discussion workshop. We assembled the smart home product designers for a collaborative landscaping exercise using these design methods. The designers tested out each of these IoT design strategies and mapped them into a design process model. In the interview, there was an understanding of the design process followed and challenges faced by these designers during the process of designing smart home. Interview questions were formulated to understand the journey of designers and various challenges faced by them. We had targeted for qualitative analysis of the information, so the order and formations of the questions need not to be definite in our case. Interview questions were face validated by three research scholars. A pilot study had been conducted to validate the questions. We could identify the ideation toolkits and user centric design methods followed while designing SH-PSS. Following this, we propose that collaborative approaches to understanding each method, that may help the design research community. We conclude that the design research community may benefit from more accurate mappings when selecting the best suitable smart home design method for a particular task in a specific context.