| Beschreibung |
Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io) is the world’s largest open-source project on GitHub, developed and maintained by a global community of contributors. With over 2 million installations, the smart home platform represents a significant open-source success story, built around the values of choice, sustainability, and privacy. Home Assistant runs locally unlike many commercial alternatives, allowing users full data ownership. The platform is increasingly adopted by individuals motivated by goals such as sustainability, cost-efficiency, and energy independence. Many people are driven to smart home technologies that track their consumption and allow them to engage in active energy management, such as reducing peak load, responding to time-varying electricity prices, and integrating personal power production. Importantly, energy in this context comes from different sources: gas, water, electricity from the grid, self-generated solar power, electricity storage in home batteries, etc. This energy can be used for lighting, cooling, heating, ventilating, and many other purposes. Monitoring and managing these diverse energy flows is essential for achieving broader sustainability and efficient resource consumption. In addition to energy, the Home Assistant energy dashboard provides features to monitor water usage within the smart home. This research project is run in collaboration with ”Open Home Foundation”, the parent organization behind the Home Assistant platform. The project will investigate how effectively Home Assistant products support people who use the platform with these energy-related motivations. It explores the user journey from initial awareness, to setup, to meaningful usage of the Energy Dashboard and energy-related features. The focus lies on analyzing how the platform's current features equip people to consume, monitor, interpret, and act on their energy data in ways that align with their sustainability and energy management goals. The project tasks include evaluating Home Assistant’s energy features and the associated setup and onboarding processes, assessing usability, clarity, and alignment with the expectations of both novel and experienced users that newly started with energy management. The aim is to identify how the platform, particularly its energy features, can better support users' energy-related needs and wishes regarding smart home practices. The project’s active phase runs till the end of March. Presence in Weimar is mandatory with a possibility of remote work during the last three weeks of March. Vacations can be organized with a prior notice (thus the workload can be managed by the team). Christmas break is already scheduled according to official break duration. Through User-Centered Design process we will go from research to prototypes. The deliverables of the project include: platform evaluation, UX research and actionable research report, and new features/feature improvement prototypes. The research results could be used as a case for your portfolios. Project is offered as 12 ECTs or 18 ECTs project with respective amount of workload. The workload is scheduled in two-week sprints and distributed through the whole semester with accommodation for a Christmas break. Presence at the project meeting and ability to allocate required time for working on the project is mandatory requirement (therefore, we do not recommend doing more than 30 ECTS altogether and to carefully consider which other intensive courses to take alongside). All students need to email Margarita with CV to check whether you qualify for the project. Feel free to reach out for more details or with questions or clarifications to be sure that this project is a good fit for you. margarita.osipova@uni-weimar.de |
| Voraussetzungen |
Students from HCI Masters and CS4DM: have successfully completed at least one of the following courses from the HCI chair: ”HCI Theory & Research Methods”, ”Ubiquitous Computing”, or ”HCI Introduction”. We further expect general interest in smart home technology and UX research and design, willingness to work in a team and solve complex design problems. Prototyping skills (lo-fi and hi-fi) as well as Figma knowledge would be beneficial. We additionally require for the applicants to have a respective amount of time to work on the project from October till the end of March. To avoid issues after the project selection algorithm, we require interested students to write an email to Margarita to confirm eligibility for participation in the project. If you have not emailed us and do not qualify after the algorithm distribution, you would be automatically unenrolled from this project. Please apply by E-Mail to margarita.osipova@uni-weimar.de (please include a motivation statement, mention which courses you took, and provide a description of your prior experience in relevant areas, with examples of prior work if applicable)! |
