In user-centered design, it’s often assumed that users should validate our assumptions, test our prototypes, and even shape the direction of the design itself. Design moves beyond usability into speculation, critical reflection, and non-human-centered perspectives, so it becaumes hard to define what it means to evaluate a design. We explore how interaction design is evolving and how traditional ideas of evaluation may no longer be enough.
They argue that the home has become so “natural” that we stop questioning it. So they use design to make the home strange again. They show how technologies often reinforce outdated norms—like assuming the woman is always cooking, or that privacy means isolation.
Defamiliarization challenges that. It asks us to re-see what we take for granted. And like design fiction, it doesn't solve problems—it reveals them.
By making the familiar appear strange it orders to encourage critical reflection, rather than passively propagate, the existing politics and culture of home life and to develop new alternatives for design. Domestic spaces are seen as over-familiar, leading designers to reproduce unexamined assumptions about
gender roles, efficiency, privacy, and family structure. Ethnographies show that homes are not the same everywhere, also in one country. Peoples’ expectations and desires differ across and between cultures. These things need to be taken into account when designing living spaces.
They’re not interested in making better smart homes. They’re interested in making better questions about homes.
One project that really illustrates traditional user-centered evaluation in a complex context is The Aware Home. This was a full-scale experimental house built to explore how technologies could support aging in place, helping older adults live independently and safely in their own homes for longer. It was made in cause Rising costs and emotional downsides of institutional care and the increasing aging population with cognitive and physical decline. The home is equipped with sensors, cameras, and intelligent systems to monitor things like movement, posture, routines, and even memory lapses. For example, one prototype called “What Was I Cooking?” uses sensors and video to help users remember interrupted kitchen tasks. Another project, the Digital Family Portrait, gives remote family members a subtle visualization of how active their loved one has been over time—so they can be reassured without invading privacy. From an evaluation standpoint, this work is grounded in user-centered design: identifying real needs, creating functional prototypes, and testing them through observation and usability feedback. But even in this context, we see deeper questions emerge: What behaviors are we normalizing? What does “awareness” mean when it’s being sensed by a machine? The Aware Home reminds us that even highly practical designs reflect values—and that evaluation is never truly neutral.
Design fiction explores and critiques possible futures by creating speculative artifacts and often provocative scenarios. Design fictions aren’t predictions. They’re not necessarily prototypes either. They’re provocations. They create stories around imagined technologies. The goal is to invite users to reflect on emerging technologies, cultural norms, or systemic issues. These fictions often highlight what could go wrong, or what’s already wrong with the systems we live in.
This is where things get tricky. Traditional evaluation methods—like usability tests or surveys—don’t really work here. You can’t ask a user to rate their satisfaction with an imaginary product, so it remains unclear how to evaluate what good or bad design fiction is. This is because its value depends heavily on its intention and goals. Instead of using just one way to judge design fiction, we should use different approaches that match what each design fiction is trying to achieve.