Designing the fog: towards an intranet of things

The Fog of Things, ubiquitous computing in local contexts, is a reality now. The Internet of Things has arrived, although users use and perceive it rather as Internet of Thing [sic!]. Data and information flows vertically, not horizontally through the connected Everyday and promises of convenience and quality of life are at the mercy of the viability of business models and the benevolence of multi-national commercial entities. This position paper poses that things and connectedness can also be re-thought; products and services can be designed differently: bottom-up and with stronger ideals in place. Systems of connected things can be understood as horizontal autonomous networks of nodes, Intranets, that do not or only seldom connect to external entities for the exchange of data. This paper explains how to conceptualize these systems, proposes the use of system properties to address new design challenges, and concludes with an outlook on future work.