Interacting with Rigid and Soft Surfaces for Smart-Home Control

For an improved user experience in smart homes, there is a need to enhance the current interaction methods by embedding control interfaces in everyday household objects. Embedded interfaces will allow smart home inhabitants to control their surroundings using more familiar interaction concepts and techniques than those imposed by appliance manufacturers and vendors. However, to achieve this state, technology designers need to understand the behaviours and attitudes of end users when they interact with different elements of a smart home using everyday objects as control media. We present a set of exploratory investigations focused on understanding the behaviours and attitudes of end-users as they control elements of a fictional smart home. Accordingly, we investigate how two highly different locations and form factors -- a table surface and a couch pillow -- impact user expectations about gestures used to control various smart home features. To this end, we conducted explorative elicitation with 14 participants. Our results highlight that an object's physicality significantly impacts the types of gestures users perceive as intuitive and that deforming an interface has the potential to bring playfulness to interaction. Following our observations, we formulated four design implications for conceiving interaction modalities with deformable interfaces for domestic environments.