Eliciting Affordances for Smart Objects in IoT Era

In this paper we suggest a design research method for eliciting affordances and new meanings for Smart Objects in the Internet of Things Era. After an introduction to the topic and the description of some open issues, we propose to adopt a Critical Design approach, where the role of Ambiguity is twofold: on the one hand, it is the objective of the observation for defining a set of ambiguous objects or affordances; on the other hand, it is the result of a design conceptualization of smart objects aiming at provoking cognitive dissonance and finalized to understand people adaptation processes and behaviors.