Finding Design Opportunities for Smartness in Consumer Packaged Goods
This addresses the need for smarter CPGs to enhance user services, but it is incremental as it focuses on early-stage method development without broad impact.
The study tackled the problem of understanding how Consumer Packaged Goods (CPGs) are used in practice to design smart, IoT-enabled interventions, using cooking as a case study with auto-ethnographic data, but results are preliminary with no concrete numbers reported.
This study attempts to understand the use of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) in practice to obtain insights to develop design interventions that bring the CPGs into the Internet of Things. Our ultimate aim is to equip CPGs with a layer of smartness so that CPGs could collect information about their use and provide extra services and functionalities. With a practice perspective we developed an assemblage of methods to analyze and represent how people use CPGs. We chose cooking as our practice case and use an auto-ethnographic data sample to demonstrate the application of our methods. Despite the early stage of our study, our methods provide ways to get an understanding of how CPGs are used in practice and an opening to establish opportunities for design interventions.