Pastiche Scenarios are a type of scenario that mimick familiar literary styles or draw upon fa-miliar characters to explore the felt-life aspects of technology use as well as socio-cultural themes around technology. Three pastiche scenarios were presented as comic books to participants. At first, the pastiche scenarios were used as thought experiments to explore socio-cultural contexts for a fictional IoT privacy device called a Data Gate, by letting the characters drive the use of the technology. The scenarios were then used as prompts to talk about how participants might use the data gates in their daily lives. Using the comic books as a reference, participants were also asked to draw, write or narrate their own pastiche scenario based on a fictional character.

Four participants were recruited from diverse backgrounds. The participants were sampled from three different age groups (20-35, 35-50 and 60+) , reflecting diversity of generational and age-related contexts of technology use. The participants were from three different countries, providing a diversity of cultural contexts in which to study use cases of the Data Gates technology. The sample group consisted of two female and two male participants. Participants were primarily an opportunity sample recruited by circulating a participant recruitment flyer to colleagues and friends via email and by approaching friends, family and acquaintances.

As part of the co-creation activities, participants were given a task to write, draw or narrate a scenario where a fictional character uses the privacy device presented in the comic books.

Results

In response to the comic books, participants created their own scenarios based around the fictional data privacy device. One participant, for example, wrote a short scenario in which a character from J.R.R. Tolkein's 'The Lord of the Rings' stories use the data privacy device to protect himself from the harmful mental health effects of IoT surveillance.

“So Sam is tired of his friend and liege Frodo killing the vibe on their adventure. Frodo carries an all powerful ring which grants him the power of invisibility. This power to disappear is extremely useful for a hobbit whos short stature frequently puts them at a disadvantage in violent situations of which the hobbits will encounter many upon their quest. The ring enables the wearer to transcend the senses. One significant drawback of harnessing this powerful technology, however is that it reveals the wearers location to the most powerful evil in middle earth. Sam has noticed a trend between Frodo’s ring use and overt paranoid, the making of grandiose statements and a general degradation of their quality time. Sam has a solution, however. Data Gates. A wise elf who has foreseen frodo’s living breakdown told Sam that if he ever perceives a change in Frodo, he must attach the Data Gate to Frodo’s cloak. With this elven mod, the hobbits can harness the great power of the ring without sacrificing their personal safety and the campfires and singing can once again be enjoyed.” (Participant)

The participants responses to the comic books helped identify 'felt-life' aspects of IoT trust, proposing the designers and IoT policymakers should foreground ways of making people feel better about their IoT interactions, even if people's fears of the IoT may be grounded in less-than-scientific facts

The results of this research contributed to a paper that can be accessed here https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3546155.3546698. The comics presented were created by the authors.

Primlani, N., Blythe, M. and Marshall, J., 2022, October. Digital Rituals in Performance: Transitions to Internet of Things Trust and Security. In Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference (pp. 1-11).