With the help of a generous grant from the LSR foundation, we are going to explore one of the most fundamental questions of our times: What does smart technology look like in action?
We explore answers to this question by analyzing the product category of smart wearables from three distinct perspectives. We first analyze how technology designers pack smartness into wearable objects and apps. Here our focus will be on the electronic and computational capabilities and features that make a tracking object smart. Second, we analyze how marketers and tech media manipulate the stories and meanings around smartness. Here our focus will be on the claims and arguments in popular culture about what should count as smart tracking tech. Third, we analyze the lived experiences of consumers engaging with smart tracking. Here our focus will be on the practices and actions of people who put smart trackers to use in their everyday lives.
In answering each of these sub-questions, members of the research team will jump across many disciplinary boundaries: science and technology studies, design studies, religious studies, human-computer interaction, and of course marketing and consumer research – to offer a novel and cohesive set of insights about smartness in action. The generous funding from LSR Foundation will give members of the research team the time and space to take risks and go beyond conventional understandings about the marketing and consumption of smart technologies and objects.
An extremely promising initial research focus is about the role of the (dumb!) human being in the smart ecosystem. If the tech ecosystem (device + connected app) is already smarter than the human wearer, how does that change the relationship dynamics? Who should be in control? How do device marketers convince us to give up our valued freedom, autonomy and authority? The Oura Ring app directs us on what to do for better sleep. The Apple Watch commands us to stand up and walk when it senses that we’ve been sitting for too long. In most cases we obey, or at least feel guilty if we don’t. How did we get here?
These and other such rarely-asked questions about the relationship between the human and the technological are at the heart of this project. These questions should be of interest to companies pushing the boundaries of smart technology, to governments and other institutions, and of course to the humans who often uncritically embed these technologies in their everyday lives.
A key building block here is an understanding of more mature and intensive self-tracking cultures, for instance South Korea. PI Kushagra Bhatnagar has secured a collaboration with professors from Yonsei School of Business, Seoul to gain first-hand knowledge of that market and will do an extended research visit with the help of LSR’s generous funding.
The research project currently has four collaborators.
- Assistant Professor of Marketing Kushagra Bhatnagar (PI). He was awarded the “Researcher of the Year” award by Aalto University School of Business in Fall 2024 for sustained excellence in research and invited to the Editorial Review Board (January 2025) of Journal of Consumer Research, the foremost academic journal in the field of consumer research.
- Full Professor of Marketing Tomas Falk (co PI) whose work focuses on how technology can better address consumer needs. He has a stellar track record of publishing in prestigious high-impact journals.
- Doctoral researcher Anna-Riikka Valo, who came to the PhD program with an excellent Master’s thesis where she studied Finnish consumers from the perspective of the Quantified Self movement.
- Post-doctoral researcher Kerstin Falk whose thesis explores how people make sense of metrics in everyday life.
DSc (Econ) Kushagra Bhatnagar is Assistant Professor at Aalto-University, Department of Marketing. In the 2024 grant round, Bhatnagar was awarded 110 000 € in grant for his research group ”Can consumers escape the paradox of tracking well-being?” The project is part of the Fund’s focus area Entrepreneurship, Scaling and Growth.