PhD research stuff

Practice-based PhD research conducted at the Centre For Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University, UK), as part of the 'AI and Algorithmic Cultures' research path, under the supervision of Dr. Kevin Walker, Dr. Alex Taylor and Dr. Lindsay Balfour.

My research is centered around virtual agents within home, interrogating the human-machine relationship; how this can be reconfigured and expanded beyond stereotyped roles and interactions that are solely focusing on automated functionality.  
Title:

The Idiotic Prism: An HCI design methodology for exploring interactions between humans and Intelligent Personal Assistants in the home.
Abstract:
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Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) like Amazon Alexa, are voice-enabled virtual agents handling mundane domestic tasks. They interact with humans in specific ways structured around their embedded “intelligence” to achieve automated functionality. However, this intelligence is a human-centered and market-driven construct limited to that which is algorithmically computable. The individual is constrained as a stereotyped “user” or “consumer” and the IPA is seen as a tool promoting efficiency, or alternately as a privacy threat, given the rising concerns about IPAs extracting data. These roles are deficient for encapsulating the complexity of human and nonhuman ecologies pertaining to the home, a space of creative potential and multiplicity, wherein life can be lived in unique ways beyond functionality.
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Turning to the opposite of “intelligence” to explore alternative interactions, I employ idiocy as that which lies outside norms and speaks from a non-deterministic stance, open to potentialities rather than measurable facts. Drawing on poststructuralism and posthumanism, while expanding speculative design with participatory methods, I build an Idiotic Prism as a design methodology for looking at things differently, detached from strict agential classifications and pre-scripted interactions. The Idiotic Prism facilitates more open-ended and creative human-agent interactions through a relational perspective that brings together unquantifiable human idiosyncrasies and nonhuman agency to inform design processes in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

I employ material-discursive practices—bringing together speculation as discourse and the agential capacitiesof materiality—to explore alternative human-agent interactions through enacting what I call participatory material speculation, engaging participants in speculation and situated experiences driven by nonhuman agency. This is initially through an Idiotic Speculative Kit bringing human idiosyncrasies to speculate about “useless” idiotic agents with absurd intelligences and behaviors operating in homes, through playful tasks and a material prop. This addresses one of my research questions, What sorts of entanglements between inhabitants and IPAs might be performed besides pre-scripted ones, so as to expand domestic experiences?.

Following a thematic analysis to trace alternative possibilities of agents, an Idiotic Method, inspired by Surrealists’ cut-up technique, was devised to synthesize the Kit data into scenarios of Idiotic Agents, embracing randomness as a creative resource and fostering the inclusion of participants’ diverse voices in design decisions. Three of these scenarios were materialized into Idiotic Agents—prototypes with absurd, unprovoked actions—which were then implemented in real homes to interact with participants, and I studied the emerging relationships to investigate my second research question, How might an idiotic methodological approach enable more open-ended human-computer interactions?

‍Testing in practice posthumanism’s accountability for materiality as animate and discursive, I found that the Idiotic Agents’ intriguing design provoked participants’ idiosyncrasies to surface in interpreting the agents and relating with them. In the absence of prescriptive expectations of interaction, participants attuned to the Idiotic Agents, creating relationships that emerged from the context of interaction and through a relational human-agent perspective.The entire process, facilitating multi-phase human-nonhuman participation, was aimed at studying the conditionsfor alternative, more open-ended and creative, human-agent interactions to emerge, in order to channel these into the development of the Idiotic Prism and its applicability in HCI design and research. Although my research started from IPAs, it evolved as a broader methodology for thinking and practicing that can be taken up by HCI designers and researchers in exploring the future of human interactions with advanced technological agents. The theoretical construct ofthe Idiotic also adds to existing posthuman discourse on relationality, while addressing the theory-practice gap in bringing posthumanism into HCI design practice, and expanding the application of speculative designin empirical research.
Here lie some bits and pieces of my research.
SOME RESEARCH DIAGRAMS
conceptual framing
research design
A CREATIVE KIT FOR SPECULATION
kit 1kit 2kit 3kit 4
Merging speculative design with participatory methods, an ‘Idiotic Speculative Kit’ was handed out to participants in order to bring human idiosyncrasies to speculate about “useless” idiotic agents with absurd intelligences and behaviors operating in homes, through playful tasks and a material prop. This method addresses one of my research questions, What sorts of entanglements between inhabitants and IPAs might be performed besides pre-scripted ones, so as to expand domestic experiences?.
The Kit is composed of 5 tasks articulated through visual cards and text, some stationery and a prop around which participants are requested to experiment and come up with their own interpretations of 'idiotic' virtual agents and their agency within home. Each task is sealed in a different folder and they are to be completed one by one.
task 1 instructions
sample of cards included in Task 1 of the Idiotic Speculative Kit
kit responses
sample of participants' responses
Qualitative data is gathered from the Kit responses. After thematic data analysis and synthesis of participants' responses through an 'Idiotic Method' inpired by Surrealists' cut-up technique, this material is channeled in the next design phase where three Idiotic Agent prototypes--imbued with absurd, random, unprovoked actions--are built and implemented in real homes to conduct case stuies focused on researching what kind of interactions might come up. The intriguing design of the prototypes and their unprovoked actions are intended to employ the agential capacitiesd of materiality into driving participants to configure their interactions with the Agents. The aim is to study the conditions for interactions to emerge contextually and relationally, as the product of a shared participant-Agent agency. This empirical study and its results responds to my second research question, How might an idiotic methodological approach enable more open-ended human-computer interactions?
themes from the Kit analysis informing the features of the Idiotic Agents prototypes
SOME IDIOTIC AGENTS
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AND ANOTHER ONE
roomba1roomba2roomba3roomba4
a special Roomba
A special Roomba that moves around, scanning space while cleaning, but most importantly tracing hidden encoded messages left underneath surfaces by residents, mainly young children. Such messages have been left there, often forgotten as time passes by, and she is the only one that can retrieve and project them back to the residents. But these messages can only be understood by the ones that have composed them in the first place, probably as a game, a practice of self-expression adopted by highly introverted individuals or simply as anattempt to communicate with who knows whom/what(!?). In this way, Roomba somehow communicates with the creators of the messages through an absurd ‘dialogue’ seemingly irrational to most yet very meaningful to these very few.
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