Who's hogging the bandwidth: the consequences of revealing the invisible in the home

  • Authors:
  • Marshini Chetty;Richard Banks;Richard Harper;Tim Regan;Abigail Sellen;Christos Gkantsidis;Thomas Karagiannis;Peter Key

  • Affiliations:
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, UNK, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

As more technologies enter the home, householders are burdened with the task of digital housekeeping-managing and sharing digital resources like bandwidth. In response to this, we created and evaluated a domestic tool for bandwidth management called Home Watcher. Our field trial showed that when resource contention amongst different household members is made visible, people's understanding of bandwidth changes and household politics are revealed. In this paper, we describe the consequences of showing real time resource usage in a home, and how this varies depending on the social make up of the household.