Design and evaluation of a visual rapid prototyping environment in an existing smart home platform

Recent advances in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) are placing its own vision, as a platform of interconnected services and devices, at the heart of the smart home concept. This consolidation promises a new wave of innovative products designed in the open, and in which the user takes center stage starting from the very first steps. Therefore, researchers as well as product designers in these increasingly related fields are now tasked with a more complex mission when investigating user behavior. In this thesis we consider rapid prototyping as the upcoming standard process for investigating user interactions in the future smart home. Although past research contributed with several self-contained solutions (built from scratch) to allow such investigations, no accounts were found tackling the problem from our perspective, in which the focus is on how to enable rapid prototyping in an existing proprietary smart home platform by using open standards, software and hardware. To answer this question, we conducted our research with participation of academic researchers and professional designers in the context of an academic and industrial partnership, in an ongoing smart home research project. We used an approach based on the design science research process in combination with the user centered design (UCD) and agile software development methodologies. During this thesis we performed an end to end design process starting from ideation to implementation and evaluation; an architectural blueprint was proposed and a working prototype of our visual smart home rapid prototyping environment (SHRPE) was implemented and tested. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of enabling visual rapid prototyping capabilities in an existing smart home platform, by using the system integration process to introduce available open standards, software and hardware tools into the platform. In addition, evaluation results of user testing confirmed that using UCD to iteratively capture user needs in such complex context is a solid approach