IoT ecosystem elements

Consumer Behaviour and Interaction

A common description of interaction is, we are what we do, but this depends upon what is measured. This limited view of people is supported by those who use website statistical data to determine interaction, yet is it this simple to understand people? An understanding of cognitive functions, desires, experiences and the purpose of activities offers characterisation to establish measurable dimensions in IoT ecosystems.

Cognitive Functions in Interaction

Human cognitive functions in the area of interaction considered in this project rely upon several types of input. These include desire or drivers on a contextual basis unaffected by usability issues but defined by consumer traits (Perea, et al. 2004). Inputs also come from experiences in personal / social and commodity / product relationships which create biographical templates (Kopytoff, 1986). Inputs are derived from current activity as a form of self-narrative (Flanagan, et al. 1998) and related to a specific time frame. Finally, there are inputs that describe aspirations and goals (Hutchins, 1995). These inputs drive choices and decision activity prior to new actions and act as a description of cognitive engineering (Long and Dowell, 1998). Additionally they establish a personalised framework for the characterisation of success, error and failure in complex tasks. Ultimately a formal measurement of interaction in IoT ecosystems is needed, as a process rather than just a destination (Green and Petre, 1996). In the interim the term narrative enables an interpretation and review of real-time activity data.

Desires and Drivers

To start activity some form of catalytic reason, desire or drive is required. Not only does this define the activity but it determines aspects of how it progresses and describes a condition of success. This initiator can be based upon environmental factors including other people, society, places or environments and systems which may be attributed or conferred upon the user. These catalysts then operated in a multi-dimensional eco-system that can be influenced by many other eco-systems.

Biographical Templates

User’s experiences inform their attitude and response to stimuli. In the case of gender, women have in the past twenty years created their own digital divide gaining on and overtaking men in the accessing and utilising of internet shopping (Ono and Zavodny, 2003). This can be seen as an iteration of female shopping experience accessing a new channel. However as the process evolved over considerable time additional factors should be considered. Human physical, emotional and experiential activity maintains a biographical element through significant moments or indices. These indices create biographical competencies that relate success, failure, frustration and many other emotions to activity in social, mechanical and technological environments. As a construct that determines choice, a biography (Appadurai, 1988), (Kopytoff, 1988) is superimposed upon objects or commodities defining where they have been, how they have been changed by external factors and proposing trajectories and possible blockages. Activity is obscured by many external factors including historical, political or social conventions. Biographical notation enables the salient understanding of information that would otherwise be lost. The understanding of human interaction can be viewed as participation in the creation of personal historical elements having both biographical and active elements. The cultural disposition of technology, interactions and resultant pathways remain difficult to interpret without recourse to an activity framework. A method is then required to relate the electronic media habitus to external attributable counterpoints.

Temporal Narratives

Narratives allow the recording of active elements in internet shopping, which describe responses to information in numerous potential trajectories (Jennings, 2005). While this narrative can be characterised through a think aloud protocol (Ericsson and Simon, 1980) representations of this discourse establish the foundations of individual drives towards action (Nakhimovsky, 1988). Effective mapping can be achieved using a lexical approach (Gulrajani, 2003) as associated with recovering endangered languages. This would allow the use of rational linguistic descriptions of dimensions including orthography, morphology, syntax and semantics. The creation of a lexical basis (Pustejovsky, 1991) makes individual actions expressible aspects of groups of actions (Flanagan, 1998) with related compound, processed and adaptive meanings.

Goals

Goals can be a descriptor of predetermined final destinations or may offer a general context rather than a specific, “I’m looking for a book” as opposed to “I’m looking for this book”. The general interpretation of an open and untamed (Benyon, et al. 2005) source of information like the World Wide Web (WWW) requires a systematic review of actions. Actions and user activity in relation to an observable world require a common representation to determine navigation, related target acquisition or goals (Jul and Furnas, 1997). These goals can subsequently be reduced to a form of knowledge morpheme. As an inter-related sub-rationale unit “the item I seek”, the goal then would have a distinct and finite form. In seeking to achieve these goals, adaptations have been established by reduction or addition “the item I seek is not available in red” so to gain my item, “I will take it in black”.