With the widespread growth in “IoT” – the Internet of Things, ie internet-connected devices – in recent years, questions of trust, agency, privacy, and security have become ever-more pressing. There is now a broad understanding of the risks and disadvantages, alongside the benefits, of the connectedness provided by computers, tablets and smart phones. However, the rapid growth of “smart” connected devices (e.g. smart speakers, doorbells, fridges, health monitors) has the potential to amplify the risks and challenges to individuals, families, communities and wider society, through harvesting and sharing data in ways that are often opaque or misleading.
Research and development in smart technology and the IoT is often driven by technical capability and functionality, alongside business models based on a data capture and exploitation. Technical developments have outpaced the critical debates around trust and agency, putting policy makers on the back foot in seeking to provide a legal foundation for fairer, and so more trusted, relationships between commercial enterprises and their customers.
There is a need to bridge the gap between the fields of Interaction Design and/or Product Design - through which new products and services are developed - and areas such as Open Internet Advocacy - which are thinking deeply about the ways to make our relationship with IoT and the wider internet healthier.
OpenDoTT – the Open Design of Trusted Things – was an Innovative Training Network uniquely positioned within this intersection between all 3 fields: Design Research; Open Hardware; and Open Internet Policy & Advocacy. Running from 2019-2022, the Network brought together expertise in Design Research from Northumbria University, Open Internet Policy & Advocacy from Mozilla, and specific expertise including Open Hardware, design, security and legal policy, from the Consortium of 8 international partners: University of Dundee; Universität der Künste Berlin; Officine Innesto; STBY; Superbloom (formerly Simply Secure); Quicksand; Future Everything and ThingsCon.
Objective 1: Train 5 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) with the capabilities and competences to understand and design for the complex human relationships between IoT technologies and society.
Objective 2: Create a cohort of new leaders who can both practice and advocate for a trusted and healthy IoT.
Objective 3: Ensure that ESRs can interpret and communicate policy in order to design for trusted IoT.
OpenDoTT provided a research training opportunity which included delivery of the European Industrial Doctorate, in order to support the development of 5 future leaders who can “design for trust” and are equipped with the capability to meet challenges and opportunities presented by IoT. OpenDoTT placed Mozilla's “Health of the Internet” agenda at the heart of a unique training programme that advocated design informed by trust, openness, privacy, decentralization, inclusion and digital literacy.
OpenDoTT has both deepened and broadened the understanding of the risks and challenges that IoT presents, and the 5 ESRs have proposed both some new lenses through which those can be considered, and ways in which designers and policy-makers might work more fruitfully together.
