DIY Smart Home

2016 - 2026

As emerging technologies for domestic environments continue to evolve, smart homes have gained significant research and commercial attention. In particular, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) smart home products empower users to create and customize their own smart home features. Unlike traditional home automation, these products require users to actively decide which features they need, where to deploy them, and how to program and install them, leading to a fundamentally different user experience. Furthermore, as sensors and actuators become increasingly intelligent, these user experiences are shifting in complex ways. Our research focuses on respecting and enhancing user agency within this evolving landscape, developing tools and methods that support users in DIY-ing their own smart home features in step with these technological advancements.

What if smart homes could see our homes?: Exploring diy smart home building experiences with vlm-based camera sensors

Yun, S., & Lim, Y. K. (2025, April). What if smart homes could see our homes?: Exploring diy smart home building experiences with vlm-based camera sensors. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-22).

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Contact-and-Connect: Designing New Pairing Interface for Short Distance Wireless Devices

Woo, J. and Lim, Y., “Contact-and-Connect: Designing New Pairing Interface for Short Distance Wireless Devices,” Proceedings of CHI2009 Work-in-Progress, ACM Press, Boston, USA, April 4-9, 2009.

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Clipoid: an augmentable short-distance wireless toolkit for ‘accidentally smart home’ environments

Woo, J., and Lim, Y., “Clipoid: an augmentable short-distance wireless toolkit for ‘accidentally smart home’ environments,” Proceedings of CHI 2012, ACM Press, (Texas, USA, May 5-10, 2012), pp.1751-1754.

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Touch or remote: comparing touch-and remote-type interfaces for short distance wireless device connection

Woo, J., Suk, H., Lee, H., and Lim, Y., “Touch or remote: comparing touch-and remote-type interfaces for short distance wireless device connection,” Proceedings of CHI 2013 Work-in-Progress, ACM Press, (Paris, France, 2012), pp. 1221–1226.

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DIY Smart Home

What if smart homes could see our homes?: Exploring diy smart home building experiences with vlm-based camera sensors

Potential and Challenges of DIY Smart Homes with an ML-intensive Camera Sensor

Toolkit Design for Building Camera Sensor-Driven DIY Smart Homes

User Experience in do-it-yourself style smart homes

Contact-and-Connect: Designing New Pairing Interface for Short Distance Wireless Devices

Clipoid: an augmentable short-distance wireless toolkit for ‘accidentally smart home’ environments

Touch or remote: comparing touch-and remote-type interfaces for short distance wireless device connection