Pondering Light.

Pondering Light is a qualitative interface displaying your reported feeling of perceived autonomy in your home environment. At the office, users report their perceived autonomy by squeezing the hand-held device which is displayed in their home environment in the form of a lighting fixture. Aiming to trigger a prolonged reflection about your perceived autonomy, potentially making you self-aware of the extent to which your job fulfils your needs and values.

 

Millennials have become the majority in the office environment, they look for jobs that contribute to their self-fulfillment and improve their well-being. Still, work-related technology as a means to increase intrinsic motivation is often not considered.

 

Procedural autonomy within the office environment plays a large role in how you perceive your work and contribute to your well-being. Therefore, in this research is looked at can reporting your procedural autonomy by using a qualitative interface create awareness for millennials in the office environment. Qualitative interfaces are forms of interfaces that present information through representing qualities of phenomena, to help people explore their thinking and relationships with technology.

 

Using Research through Design, qualities were identified which can be used to provoke reflection on your perceived procedural autonomy in the office environment. Through a user study and an autobiographical study, it was evaluated if these qualities were able to be used as such. Squeezing as a means to translate internalized emotions into an external interface, was found to give comfort when reporting low perceived autonomy. However, the interaction was not perceived inviting enough when having a high perceived autonomy.

 

Where reflection comes into being when at home, having a light fixture as means of visualization was found to trigger reflection when being at home. However, on the other hand changes in lighting were not perceived as attractive enough to respond on. Suggesting that the current changes of the lighting could be expressed in an other way to gain more attention of the user. Overall, it was found that the qualities  are often highly contextual and individual.