Experimental Prototype

Crowdsourced IoT Products Dissecting

(2019)

IoT HCI

Internet of Things (IoT) Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Software Engineering (SE) Education (E)

Project Overview

Uses the open-source OLYMPUS platform to help learners analyse commercial IoT products together, surfacing design decisions and encouraging deeper peer discussion about connected-device ecosystems.

Computing devices such as laptops, tablets, and mobile phones have become part of our daily lives. End users increasingly understand how these devices are built and can decide between them. The same is not yet true for IoT products. Because the marketplace is still emerging, people often have little idea about the trade-offs designers make. To address this gap, we created OLYMPUS, a crowdsourced peer-learning activity that guides learners to inspect IoT products, reason about their architecture, and discuss their design choices.

We validated the approach through two user studies that demonstrate how the activity promotes deeper thinking about IoT ecosystems. OLYMPUS is open source and available for the community to reuse and extend.