By: Joep Frens, Mathias Funk, Janet Huang
Part of State of Responsible Tech 2025, Generative Things
Frens, J., Funk, M., Huang, J. (2025). Distributed everything – a workshop on weird modularity. In RIOT 2025, State of Responsible Tech – Generative Things (pp. 83-91). Stichting ThingsCon Amsterdam
https://thingscon.org/publications/riot-2025/riot-2025-distributed-everything-a-workshop-on-weird-modularity/
Abstact (generated):
This contribution presents a hands-on design workshop that explores the implications of radical modularity and distributed functionality in the Internet of Things (IoT). Challenging conventional product-centric design paradigms, the workshop prompts participants to co-create a distributed office security system using everyday sensors, actuators, and contextual constraints within a real-world space. By leveraging the notion of “mundane characters”—a narrative tool inspired by extreme characters—the exercise fosters deeper engagement with multi-actor systems, prompting the design of idiosyncratic, human-centered interactions with ambient technology. Participants collaboratively mapped timelines of character activity, navigating emergent tensions, overlaps, and unexpected scenarios to build richer speculative systems. The workshop reveals how current IoT design often defaults to isolated, app-bound experiences and underscores the difficulty—and opportunity—of designing with existing context and systems. The authors argue for a reconceptualization of “generative things” not as fixed artifacts, but as modular infrastructures that afford creative reconfiguration, social negotiation, and ethical reflection. The work contributes a methodology for participatory design in complex socio-technical systems, emphasizing the value of distributed agency, narrative-based design, and the human imagination in shaping responsible futures for IoT.