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Chapter 3. Pilot Studies: Lessons Learned from Early Projects
Finally, we showed that when integrated into the objects themselves, instructions
are less disruptive during the task, as users do not need to keep checking the printed
instructions.
3.2 Lessons Learned from
Proactive Furniture Assembly
The furniture project gained remarkable attention of various media and became
as such quite popular: Starting from several TV appearances (BBC news, Swiss
National TV) to various newspaper and news-magazine articles (New Scientist,
TimesOnline, CT). In retrospective this popularity may be explained by di erent
parameters the project fulfilled: Although technological progress has embedded sen-
sors and microprocessors into various fields of everyday life, the instrumentation of
furniture with sensors still seems exotic for a broader audience. Accordingly, the
idea of sensors in furniture was often seen as exciting and funny. Thoughts arose
as “what happens if my furniture watches me” or “what about viruses in the furni-
ture software”. Simultaneously, these far-taken thoughts could be grounded into a
graspable piece of furniture and interwoven with the everyday experience from one’s
own furniture assembly tasks. Furniture assembly is well-known, common-place,
and mundane.
On the other hand we also experienced the limits of the furniture scenario in more
thorough discussions with other ubiquitous computing researchers1 and also furni-
ture developers2. It was mostly seen as a cute little idea. Furniture assembly was
not seen as such a relevant problem that it would be worth to solve it by sensor
technology, since current costs are still in the order of the entire furniture’s value.
When attempting to transfer the concept of proactive instructions to more safety-
critical applications with better cost-benefit ratio, the need for a more general plan
representation became apparent. The same applied to the sensing concept which
mainly worked for furniture since it was a clearly defined and closed-world problem
with only six pieces and a limited number of sensible actions.
As a result, we learned that the furniture prototype was a compelling showcase
by itself, but it was not enough to stimulate people’s minds and make them think
beyond established routines. Nevertheless, it helped to reveal issues that need to
be solved for real applications of proactive instructions. The development of the
furniture prototype was clearly only a first step towards a real innovation that, if
at all, could come to practice. In retrospective an iterative approach with meetings
together including furniture designers, interior designers, etc. could have helped to
1Project presentation at Emerging Technologies Exhibition at Siggraph 2003, San Diego
2Project presentation at furniture days in Dresden, May 2004
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