Right now, today’s connected devices operate mostly independently from each other. As such, their capabilities and the interactions they facilitate with users are relatively limited. Even getting them to connect to each other can often be a pain.

Tasked with exploring the deeper question of what might be possible if these individually ‘dumb’ devices actually worked together, Humanistic built off of Bill Buxton’s ideas on Ubiety; collections of devices that communicate with each other in the background to sense and anticipate human user’s needs.

Our designers and researchers led an exploration into how our technology partner might leverage their extensive portfolio of smart, connected devices to enable both practical ubiquitous computing and next generation multimodal interaction. Such a web of compatible connected devices could be utilized to enable intelligent personalized user experiences anywhere, any time, even when constrained by relatively little computing power.

Humanistic conducted a broad ethnographic study of people from various economic backgrounds, walks of life, and lifestyles in order to construct models of how they built connected device ecosystems around their lives.

Combined with these insights, our team also performed an extensive horizon scan of existing and emergent IoT products and platforms, following with a foresight study to gather and analyze those signals, trends, and forces shaping the ubiquitous computing landscape - not to mention the changing nature of relationships, home and work.

Our team took an exhaustive look at the market landscape, revealing a wealth of opportunities for ambient and ubiquitous computing usages of smart, connected devices. The market scan concluded with a selection of detailed speculative future scenarios, and provided our client with numerous IP (patentable) concepts and future product ideas to explore

Beyond the foresight, our team developed a comprehensive treatise on how to architect a device ecosystem which would enable humans to interact with teams of connected devices multimodally, and seamlessly. The guideline included an entirely new interaction model which would guide intelligent device behaviors, and enable natural, ambient, and spatialized user experiences with users.