NERD 2021 - Presentation Notes
- Welcoming
- animism in design
- thanking for presence, opportunity
- joke on NERD acronym
- introduce myself
- Overview Presentation
- Animism
- Research Design
- Findings and Implications
- Quote
- Qualities of/in Design
- On Animism
- is one of this terms
- applied in different areas
- animism as treating or seeing other-than-human things as a subjects, different sources and different expression, other-than-human that is treated human-like
- Matrix
- Phenomenological / Epistemological - Sources of animist view
- Reactive / Active - Practices
- is one of this terms
- Examples
- Hari-Kuyo (epi/a)
- Roomba (phe/a)
- roombification example
- Aibo (phe-epi/re-a -> epi/a)
- Hypothesis / Question
- focus on tech things because of my background
- Research Design
- 3 phases, collecting, analysis and prototyping
- Looked at Problem through Industrial Design
- Focus on materialities and product design
- Emotional Durable Design
- Waste is a failed Relationship
- Focus on voice assistants
- Relatively new, rapidly established itself, act of speaking to a thing lends itself
- Weak Signals, to be extrapolated into testable prototype
- what are these in general and in the context of this project
- why was that important
- animist practices still present, ie Piguet research on animism in children
- Research Body / Data
- ~25h of direct observation in the homes of owners of VAs
- several interviews with longtime owners of VAs
- user journeys of unboxing and setup of new owners of VAs
- also collected online voices, as well as images of advertisements as well as hacked or customized voice assistants
- Workshop
- capture the voices of designers and their respective disciplines
- working with research body, pre-findings / pre-themes
- taking methods from speculative/future design
- produce stories that imagine alternative near future scenarios of how we live with VAs
- Thematic Analysis
- process of TA (data -> labeling -> Themes)
- comparable to affinity mapping, but more of a deep reading
- reflexive approach after Brown and Clarke
- intuitively and according with my own values as research as an embodied practice -> quote “creating, not emerging”
- trail of truth
- reflexive in the work -> journal, describing
- 220 codes, 6 subthemes and 1 final theme
- Findings
- Slightly disappointed at findings but were to be expected
- was set out to discover and work with weak signals of active practices coming from an epistemological source -> top right
- found reactive practices coming from a phenomenological
basis -> bottom left
- place VAs on Matrix (phe/re)
- two themes; trust issues, uncanny valley
- Found ample examples of the uncanny valley
- VAs treated as non-human actants but often creepy
- device activation, unnatural communication, sheer presence
- Participants miss a proper vocabulary to deal with the non-human presence in case of errors and generally have a hard time bonding with VAs
- VAs treated as non-human actants but often creepy
- Trust Issues
- Privacy, Intimacy, Consent
- Macro -> Micro
- Macro; Privacy -> closed sourced technologies and data tracking practices
- Midi; Intimacy -> VAs as invisible interfaces entziehen sich in a negotiation of intimacy, while still embeding themselves in the social strata of the home
- Micro; Consent -> No control in exchange, the user is unable to disagree
- Alexa Alien anecdote
- Implication
- from animism in the focus to animism as a given
- usage of animism is more reflected now with the help of the matrix
- was able to focus research question
- prototyping user journeys
- how can we negotiate trust, respectively privacy, intimacy and consent with iot devices like voice assistants
- shift from materialities and product design to interaction and user experience design
- from animism in the focus to animism as a given
- Optional - betti marenkos neo-animism in design framework -
uncertainity (ambiguity) to encourage exploration of system as
well as relateability - Ambiguity - jonathan chapmans
emotionally durable design
- roomba is rambo principles