Indoor Photovoltaic Interactive Surfaces for Sustainable Smart Home Control: Gesture Design using Guessability and Production Methods
Nora Abdullah Almania, Sarah Yousef Alhouli, Deepak Ranjan Sahoo · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025
Indoor photovoltaic materials are novel low-cost light sensors that can be flexible, decorative, self-powered, and battery-free, and can be embedded in various surfaces throughout the home. They offer a unique opportunity for contextual control of multiple different devices in a smart home using guessable and favorite gestures. Currently available gesture vocabularies are survey-based and sensor-agnostic, but still require experimental validation. Therefore, we present experimentally generated and validated original gesture vocabularies using two user elicitation methods, the guessability and production methods, for such sensors. The capabilities of the sensor was used to prime participants for design thinking to multi-control smart home devices. We provide guidelines for designing gesture vocabularies using the two elicitation methods and report on their similarities and differences. The methodological findings and experimentally validated gesture sets would inform HCI researchers in the design of user-elicited interactions for such versatile light or electromagnetic field sensors and similar gesture-driven applications.