Design Principles for Polite Devices

I'm putting this in the blog area of my site to keep the home page focused on work that had a definite problem and solution, but this project was definitely one of the most eye-opening things I've gotten involved with at the Institute of Design. The need for a broader discourse on design principles for privacy in interaction design is what pushed my classmate Brian Lucas and me to dive into the creation of this set of guidelines. Our focus was on the emerging field of networked objects, the component parts of the so called 'internet of things' that is now finding its way from the periphery into the mainstream. To gain a broader perspective, we looked to the classic critiques of ubiquitous computing in Philip K. Dick's Ubik, the psychology of the self as proposed by Erving Goffman, and Helen Nissenbaum's work on digital privacy, just to name a few. Our research and discussions led us to the creation of three principles that we believe should be considered by all interaction designers before moving from the concept stage to the ideation stage of creating a new digital product or service.