Making Everyday Things Talk: Speculative Conversations into the Future of Voice Interfaces at Home

Reddy, Anuradha, Kocaballi, A. Baki, Nicenboim, Iohanna, Juul Søndergaard, Marie Louise, Lupetti, Maria Luce, Key, Cayla, Speed, Chris, Lockton, Dan, Giaccardi, Elisa, Grommé, Francisca, Robbins, Holly, Primlani, Namrata, Yurman, Paulina, Sumartojo, Shanti, Phan, Thao, Bedö, Viktor and Strengers, Yolande (2021) Making Everyday Things Talk: Speculative Conversations into the Future of Voice Interfaces at Home. In: CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, United States, pp. 1-6. ISBN 9781450380959

Abstract

What if things had a voice? What if we could talk directly to things instead of using a mediating voice interface such as an Alexa or a Google Assistant? In this paper, we share our insights from talking to a pair of boots, a tampon, a perfume bottle, and toilet paper among other everyday things to explore their conversational capabilities. We conducted Thing Interviews using a more-than-human design approach to discover a thing’s perspectives, worldviews and its relations to other humans and nonhumans. Based on our analysis of the speculative conversations, we identifed some themes characterizing the emergent qualities of people’s relationships with everyday things. We believe the themes presented in the paper may inspire future research on designing everyday things with conversational capabilities at home.

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