Abstract
Increased smart device ownership creates opportunities for people to use any device for their everyday tasks. Some devices might be used continuously while some others may be underused or idle. Similarly, some sensors or resources within devices may also be underused compared to others. For example, if one uses their smartphones mostly for email, social media and web browsing, their needs for computational power and battery will be lower compared to others who play 3D games or engage in highquality video streaming. This thesis focuses on investigating users’ willingness to participate in collaborative consumption of unused or underused resources of smart devices (e.g., sensors, touchscreen displays) and provides design strategies to stimulate and nurture the sharing and borrowing of smart devices’ resources. These useful resources are valuable, e.g., for opportunistic multi-device computing and sensing, or multi-device interaction applications that could not be run on a single device due to insufficient resources. We have quantified users’ willingness to share access to smartphone sensors (and the data they produce) using a reverse auction study. The results demonstrate that most users would be willing to share even highly private and intrusive sensors if they are sufficiently compensated. To nurture users’ willingness to share, we have provided a design solution that mediates the conflicts between the resource suppliers and consumers when they co-use a resource. The results of two user studies show that our design strategies improve both the resource suppliers’ perception and the effectiveness of resource coconsumption. To assist users in utilising nearby shared resources, we have proposed the design of intelligent shifting cues. We have demonstrated that shifting cues increase users’ awareness of interaction opportunities with the nearby shared resources while mitigating user interruption through a rigorous user study. Users are more willing to engage with the shared resources when being provided with sufficient information about the interaction opportunities compared to when they are not. Finally, we have presented user-reported factors that influence users’ willingness to borrow the shared resources. These factors should be communicated to users as otherwise the lack of awareness could demotivate users from engaging with the shared resources.