Cayla Key (ESR2) 
Smart Homes
WP2 D2.4 Dataset

This folder contains data from the study "Watery Alterity: Crafting Hydro-Feminist Paces for Home IoT" which was conducted over the course of 2-3 months from October to January 2021 as part of PhD research on Domestic IoT with the Open Design of Trusted Things (OpenDoTT) project.

The study aimed to investigate the research questions: 
1. How can we design healthier and more sustainable relationships between home IoT, ecology, and people 
2. What might an IoT look like if it used an ecology, like a watershed, as a central stakeholder?
3. By using water as a metaphor which operates on a non-human timescale, how might we open up different conceptions and experiences with time? How can ecological time and care on an ecological scale help us reimagine smart home technology.


For further information, the researcher Cayla Rai Key can be contacted by email: c.key@northumbria.ac.uk

Watery Alterity: Crafting Hydro-Feminist Paces for Home IoT

This study consisted of three phases of data collection:

Phase 1:  
I conducted 'home tours' in Seattle, WA USA where activities included semi-structured interviews and a mapping exercise to capture current inderstandings of how water, technology, and care flow within and throughout participans' homes. Data from these tours have been anonymized and labeled as P1-P5. Two researchewrs (Cayla Key and Stevie Koepp) also participated in the study as part of an autoethnography and are labled Cayla and Stevie. 

The captured data from this phase contains:

- Transcripts of audio recordings of each home tour
- Photographs of each map


Phase 2:    
After the home tours I installed a cup in each participants homes and provided a journal to document their experiences and reflections of living with the cup. Each participant was asked to live with the cup for at least 7 weeks and to respond to the weekly journal prompts.  

The captured data from this phase contains:

- Photographs from the cup instalation process
- Photographs from completed journal pages
- Log lines of each board including date and time of call, value, and any err codes


Phase 3:  
Lastly, after the 7+ week period I collected the cups and conducted an exit interview based on my early analysis of each journal.  

The captured data from this phase contains:

- Transcripts from the interviews
- Photographs of the cup in situ


This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813508.