Investigating the opportunity for a smart activity bag

  • Authors:

  • Sun Young Park;John Zimmerman

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

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

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Abstract

As long as people have traveled, they have constructed bags to help them carry more items than their hands will hold. While quite effective at keeping things together, bags do a poor job of communicating when something is missing. We propose that there exists an opportunity for the HCI community to improve the quality of people's lives by creating bags that have knowledge of people's schedules and equipment needs, can sense their contents, and can communicate when something has been forgotten. To investigate this opportunity, we conducted a field study with six dual-income families. Through interviews and observations we investigated their experiences using bags to organize equipment needed for children's enrichment activities. Based on the findings we generated 100 concepts and conducted a needs validation session to better understand the best opportunity to improve people's lives with technical intervention. This paper reports on our field study and needs validation session, and shares insights on the opportunities and implications of a smart activity bag.