ORIGINAL ARTICLE Frank Vetere Æ Frank Feltham Bringing emotion and physicality to domestic ICTs: interview with Steven Kyffin Received: 1 October 2005 / Accepted: 15 December 2005 / Published online: 6 July 2006 Ó Springer-Verlag London Limited 2006 Steven Kyffin is senior director of Design Research and Innovation at Philips. He is currently a member of the Philips Design Leadership Group, he heads Philips De- sign’s European Commission Research Relations pro- gram and is a member of the coordinating group for Convivio. Steven Kyffin was Director of the Industrial Design Master’s program at the Royal College of Art (RCA) London and is a visiting professor at Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e), University of North- umbria, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Southern Yangtze University. In this interview Steven Kyffin explores insights and challenges about designing domestic Information and Communication Technolo- gies (ICTs). You were involved in the creation of POGO, a crea- tive toy for constructing digital narratives [4], and living memory (LiMe), a collection of devices for supporting local communities [3]. Both devices cap- tured a sense of play and connection with environ- ment and community. What can be learnt from POGO and LiMe for the design of pervasive tech- nologies in the home? Since industrialization, the home has become very task oriented, functioning to get people fed, ready for work and ready for school. Now, we also envisage the home to be the center of care, recreation and play; a place of being and well-being and a place of recuperation rather than just a place of doing. At Philips we are concentrating on how to move pervasive computing from task-oriented technology, to a being-oriented technology. POGO and LiMe were about physically and digitally repositioning task-centered technologies into being-cen- tered technologies. From these projects, we learnt les- sons about how to design for innovation. We learnt that the form of the innovation needed to be appropriate for our clients. Philips does not specifically make children’s equipment, but it does make interfaces which need to be more intuitive, more organic and more context-adaptive. We chose the vehicle of children’s education to carry that exploration, but that turned out to be not such a good idea. It was difficult for our clients to translate what we were learning about interface design into a context relevant to them. It was difficult to convince them that our ideas could turn into an iLife or into a content-creator or movie-maker or life-memories-maker- for-adults. We couldn’t get out of the world of children. Now when we do experiments in interface design or interaction design we try to carry that work in vehicles that our clients are already using. POGO was a pilot project with several goals. It aimed to find out how children tell stories, and how social cohesion can be built through a creative activity. POGO was relatively simple because it was addressing a closed community. It involved people in a room playing to build narrative, just like children do at home when they play with a dolls house. On the other hand, LiMe was addressing an open system, an open community. It was more like using the web. Anyone could have LiMe. It can appear in public environments such as a bus stop, it can appear indoor environments such as a cafe´ or hos- pital, or it can appear at home. One of the objectives of LiMe was to measure the enhanced social cohesion of allowing people to express their opinions or points of view and to feed cultural triggers into the digital envi- ronment which would encourage people to meet physi- cally. The purpose of LiMe was to encourage people to meet physically. It was not about keeping them in con- tact in a virtual way. We wanted to see if we could design the digital content in such a way that people did not see it merely as a collection of data, but something that would enable people to actually meet around a table. F. Vetere (&) Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia E-mail: f.vetere@unimelb.edu.au Tel.: +61-38-3441496 Fax: +61-39-3494596 F. Feltham School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia E-mail: frank.feltham@rmit.edu.au Tel.: +61-39-9255328 Fax: +61-39-9255342 Pers Ubiquit Comput (2007) 11: 335–337 DOI 10.1007/s00779-006-0080-9