research

Currently conducting practice-based PhD research at the Centre For Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University, UK), 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.

Abstract:
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Household Intelligent Personal Assistants(IPAs) are voice-enabled virtual agents intended to handle mundane tasks withinhome (information seeking, controlling smart devices, planning, entertainment),supposedly making everyday life easier to navigate. However, interactions arepre-scripted and structured around a generalised idea of the user. Human-IPAinteractions being restricted, this also significantly limits the spectrum ofdomestic experiences. Iinterrogate these pre-scripted roles and interactions in order to research howdomestic experiences can be broadened. I explore how the human and the IPAmight be reconstituted under a relational, co-constituted agency, throughcontextual review and practice-based research with participants, in order todevelop a framework intended to refigure inclusivity within domestic human-IPAinteractions. Bringing together speculative and inclusive design methods inHuman-Computer Interactions (HCI), I develop what I call the idiotic framework in order to include new forms of agency in human-computer interactions. Through material-discursive practices bringing together absurd idiosyncrasies of humans and the agential potentialities of matter, the idiotic framework attempts to reconstitute human-IPA entanglements. I utilise ethnographic and inclusive design methods, along with a variation of cultural probes, to collect qualitative data from participants, and channel these into the construction of props as reconstitutedIPAs. I will then implement the props in case studies of domestic environments to observe how volunteers interact with these, and consequently assess the idiotic framework. Contributing to HCI through rethinking inclusivity and applying this in human-IPA interactions, I also inform the fields of speculative and inclusive design in an overall sense of exploring the future of domestic life.

Here lie some bits and pieces of my under-development (still way to go) research.

SOME RESEARCH DIAGRAMS

conceptual framework

idiotic design; bringing together speculative and inclusive design

research design

A CREATIVE KIT FOR SPECULATION

Working around participatory design methods, a kit–bearing similarities to cultural probes (Gaver, Dunne & Pacenti, 1999) yet approaching the tasks through a more speculative lens, suggesting new variations in the nature of tasks–came up as away to engage research participants in the design process of idiotic virtual agents. A series of open-ended and creative tasks triggers participants to speculate on the potentialities of encounters with virtual agents that go beyond the idea of functionality and user-product stereotypes. They are invited to build scenarios of agents that operate on the opposite of intelligence, as 'useless', idiotic machines that instead of executing mundane tasks they are interrupting established norms in order to interact with humans and other objects in absurd ways. The aim is to question roles and interactions as imposed by profit-driven objectives of companies and organizations that invade home privacy to extract and quantify human life while designating the rules of the human-machine relationship.

Each 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 virtual agents and their agency within home. Each task is sealed in a different folder and they are to be completed one by one.

sample of cards included in Task 1 of the kit

sample of participants' responses

Qualitative data is gathered from the kit responses. After dataanalysis and synthesis, this material is to be channeled in the next researchphase where a series of domestic idiotic-agent artefacts will be composed andimplemented in domestic environments. These artefacts will explore aspects of materialityand the agential capacities these might surface. The aim is to configurehuman-machine entanglements and their relational agency in order to expand and alter experiences of the everyday, suggesting new domestic performativities.

AND ANOTHER ONE

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.

PhD research stuff