Exploring Constellation of Everyday Things to Envision Future Collaboration of Smart Things

Internet of Things [IoT] is a vision that every object can be connected and work as a group to create new experiences in people's living. However, many existing IoT products are just designed as internet-enabled products that are remotely controlled through the cloud. Design researchers critically reflect that IoT designers are limited by the traditional single product design perspective, and lack of systematic perspective in seeing IoT as a design for collaboration of things. They recalled IoT designers to revisit the everyday practice in identifying ways to design intelligences into the existing products and exploring design inspirations for collaboration of things. This work proposes Thing Constellation, a novel approach to investigating the collaboration of everyday products and exploring the possible design patterns for future intelligent design. This work contributes ways of understanding relationships among people and objects that would be difficult to elicit through traditional observations.