Hacking

The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as a major new paradigm for technology, offering the potential to change the role of technology in our daily lives as physical devices, vehicles, and buildings all become networked. A central concern with IoT is security – with much technical research focused on creating secure protocols and technologies. This projects goal is to develop the cultural, political and empirical understandings that will be needed to regulate, manage, and design for secure IoT. The project is conducting multidisciplinary research that provide answers to the following broader research questions: What are the relationships between powerful stakeholders, and how will networks of control influence individuals and users? What new roles do people take when facing questions of security in IoT? What emerging changes in cultural and social behaviours can already be observed? How does the design of IoT devices and their infrastructures affect understandings of security? And lastly, how can technical IoT developments learn from social science work?

Our case studies will look at historical examples on the adoption of existing infrastructures and their relationships with regulation (such as building codes, fire prevention, photography in public), on current practices of domesticating IoT in everyday contexts (both among early adopters, e.g. users of remote camera systems), on technical developments in creating and testing new security demonstrators that are redesigned in more human-centred ways, and on reviewing existing regulation and technical guidelines. This project provides relevant academic and societal impact by bringing together social, technical and cultural perspectives to understand and shape technology.