Discovering the Potential of Living Room Objects as Alternative Smart Home Controllers: An Exploration of Secondary Affordances

Smart home appliances are becoming more popular, yet their user interfaces (UI) often lack integration into living spaces and daily practices. To facilitate more natural interactions, reduce clutter and promote better integration in our living spaces, we propose embedding controls into everyday objects. This paper outlines our approach in three steps: identifying suitable household objects through ethnographic research, gathering interaction ideas via user gesture elicitation, and evaluating the intuitiveness of conceptual interfaces through a Wizard-of-Oz study. Our findings suggest that an object's primary function has less influence on its potential as a smart home controller. Instead, its location, physical characteristics, and intuitive affordances play a more significant role in shaping its potential. Designers should, therefore, focus on making these affordances easily discoverable by concurrently considering the object's physical properties, function, and interaction context.