More-than-humanDesign and AI:
In Conversation with Agents
Organised by Iohanna Nicenboim, Elisa Giaccard, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Anuradha Venugopal Reddy, Yolande Strengers, James Pierce, and Johan Redström
The workshop brought together HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to explore how to study and design (with) AI agents from a more-than-human design perspective. Through design activities, we experimented with Thing Ethnography (Giaccardi et al. 2016, Giaccardi, 2020) and Material Speculations (Wakkary et al. 2015), as a starting point to map and possibly integrate emergent methodologies for more-than-human design, and align them with third-wave HCI. The workshop was conducted in four sessions across different regions in the world, and had about 35 participants. We explored AI agents from a more-than-human design perspective along three themes.
The workshop was organised as part of DIS (ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference). You can read the workshop publication at the ACM digital library.
Iohanna Nicenboim, Elisa Giaccardi, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Anuradha Venugopal Reddy, Yolande Strengers, James Pierce, and Johan Redström. 2020. More-Than-Human Design and AI: In Conversation with Agents. In Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS' 20 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 397–400. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395912
Documentation
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One of the workshop’s outcomes was a questionnaire for conversational agent to probe them in issues of gender, identity, ownership, and others. Try asking some of these questions to your conversational agent (such as Alexa, Siri, Google Home, or others)!