Smart monitoring of cattle on pasture According to the Swedish Board of Agriculture, meadows and pastures have decreased by hundreds of thousands of hectares in Sweden over the past hundred years. Valuable pastures can be located far from the farm, which means that the farmer chooses not to use it as it means long transport distances for daily supervision and monitoring of the animals. The problem has become more common with the structural change towards fewer and larger farms that has taken place in agriculture in recent decades. Farmers can, when the pasture is far from the farm, hire people who live closer to the pasture for the day-to-day care of the animals. However, counting the animals can be a task that is difficult to maintain, as it can be difficult even for an experienced zookeeper, especially if it is a larger group of animals and hilly terrain. If this step is handled automatically, it will be easier for the farmer to hire another person for the daily care of the animals and thus the possibility of using hard-to-reach pasture is increased. The project focused on finding low-cost and smart technical solutions to facilitate the tracking of animals, with the aim of developing a monitoring system for cattle on pasture to ensure that the animals are counted as part of a farmer’s daily supervision. The monitoring system that has been developed uses satellite communication to send the position of the animals up to four times a day to a mobile app, which gives the farmers an indication that all the animals have moved. In addition, the farmer receives alarms via email if the animals have too little activity or have moved outside of their designated pasture. Based on the experience from the field trials that were carried out, and from feedback from the farmers who participated in the project, it is concluded that the monitoring system can facilitate the monitoring of animals on pasture and at the same time be economically viable for a farmer. However, there is an opportunity to further develop the monitoring system to add functions such as water and electrical fence monitoring, which would make it possible to handle even more of the daily supervision digitally and only have manual supervision a few times a week.

We describe a case in which a small company with no competence in the Internet of Things has attempted to develop a connected product. Many of the issues that have come up around this process are not centered around the technology or the technical solution. Instead, the IoT brings additional challenges connected to the change of the customer-provider relationship, the need for a new business model, the need to understand the IoT ecosystem to make a product fit in, and the challenge of getting access to all the different competences needed. Our results suggest that governmental strategies, funding systems, investors and other stakeholders need to broaden the perspective on the IoT from a technological focus to include many other aspects that must be in place for companies to succeed in the IoT world, such as business models and customer relationship, as well as the positioning of a product in an IoT ecosystem. 

This paper describes how home appliances might be enhanced to improve user awareness of energy usage. Households wish to lead comfortable and manageable lives. Balancing this reasonable desire with the environmental and political goal of reducing electricity usage is a challenge that we claim is best met through the design of interfaces that allows users better control of their usage and unobtrusively informs them of the actions of their peers. A set of design principles along these lines is formulated in this paper. We have built a fully functional prototype home appliance with a socially aware interface to signal the aggregate usage of the user's peer group according to these principles, and present the prototype in the paper.

This paper presents the development of a lightweight component model that allows user to manage the introduction and arrangement of new interactive services and devices in the home. The model is responsive to ethnographic studies of the interplay between the Space-plan or interior layout and Stuff or artefacts placed within the fabric of the home. Interaction techniques developed through user-participation enable household members -- rather than designers -- to configure and reconfigure interactive devices and services to meet local needs. As a result, we have developed a tablet-based editor that discovers available ubiquitous components and presents these to users as 'jigsaw pieces' that can be dynamically assembled and recombined.

This paper presents the development of a lightweight component model that allows user to manage the introduction and arrangement of new interactive services and devices in the home. Interaction techniques developed through userparticipation enable household members – rather than designers – to configure and reconfigure interactive devices and services to meet local needs. As part of this we have developed a tablet-based editor that discovers available ubiquitous components and presents these to users as jigsaw pieces that can be dynamically recombined. We conclude by considering the broad implications for the design of interactive domestic environments suggested by our approach.

This paper presents the development of a user-oriented framework to support the user reconfiguration of ubiquitous domestic environments. We present a lightweight component model that allows a range of devices to be readily interconnected and an editor to support users in doing this. The editor discovers available ubiquitous components and presents these to users as jigsaw pieces that can be dynamically recombined. The developed editor allows users to assemble lightweight sensors, devices such as displays and larger applications in order to meet their particular needs.

We describe our experiences of creating and using a wide variety of techniques and applications to support collaboration in virtual environments for different activities and user groups. Our aim is to offer plentiful and rich possibilities for interaction across and between both real and virtual environments.

We describe the iterative design of two collaborative storytelling technologies for young children, KidPad and the Klump. We focus on the idea of designing interfaces to subtly encourage collaboration so that children are invited to discover the added benefits of working together. This idea has been motivated by our experiences of using early versions of our technologies in schools in Sweden and the UK. We compare the approach of encouraging collaboration with other approaches to synchronizing shared interfaces. We describe how we have revised the technologies to encourage collaboration and to reflect design suggestions made by the children themselves.