Design Considerations for Interactive Office Lighting

This work is published and presented at CHI 2019.

Adopting the Internet of Things paradigm in office lighting systems allows people to have personal lighting control at their workplace. An understanding of how people experience lighting interaction in their everyday work-life is needed to design the interfaces that people can use to interact with the lighting. Still, lighting control is often explored in lab settings.

We designed and deployed two lighting control interface in a real-life office equipped with a state-of-the-art lighting system of 400+ luminaires. We evaluated their experience with the lighting system and the lighting control interfaces. In ten weeks, 43 office workers interacted with the system 3937 times.

The findings of the study illustrate the effects of using a smartphone for lighting control, how people experience lighting control in shared situations, and issues with automatic system behaviour. We define design considerations for interface characteristics, shared control, and hybrid control. The work contributes to making the potential benefits of interactive office lighting a reality.

Interface Characteristics		Shared Control		Hybrid Control
Availability of Control	Control Definition	Inform Awareness	Support Coordination	System Initiative	System Accountability
Location Ownership Modality	Parameter definition Resolution Noticeability	Information needs Enforce Identity Accountability	Availability Visibility Expressivity	Appropriateness Engage in a dialogue User override	Contextual understanding Motivation Priority

Results

10 weeks of use was evaluated with 23 study participants. The findings of the study illustrate the effects of using a smartphone for lighting control, how people experience lighting control in shared situations, and issues with automatic system behaviour. The result is a set of design considerations for interfaces, shared control, and automatic system behaviour. More details can be found in the CHI 2019 publication.