by Michael Shorter, Bettina Minder, Jon Rogers, Matthias Baldauf, Aurelio Todisco, Sabine Junginger, Aysun Aytaç, Patricia Wolf
Abstract:
Voice assistants (VAs), typically promoted as omniscient conversational butlers, still remain below users’ expectations. Interaction designers seem to struggle bringing in user perspectives necessary to develop more meaningful VA applications beyond simple use cases such as playing music. One of the reasons might be the immateriality of cloud-based VA technology making it difficult to comprehend such complex and ever-evolving systems. In this paper, we investigate provotyping as a design tool for ‘materialising the immaterial’. In our case study, teams of multidisciplinary experts devised twelve provotypes to explore intangible VA technology. We present and discuss three generalisations in respect to the role of provotypes for the exploration of VAs. Our findings show provotypes can serve as the necessary props by which we can bring in missing perspectives around this technology and generate material which enables designers to speculate, debate, and sketch out ideas for meaningful futures of VA applications.
Reference:
M. Shorter, B. Minder, J. Rogers, M. Baldauf, A. Todisco, S. Junginger, A. Aytaç and P. Wolf, "Materialising the Immaterial: Provotyping to Explore Voice Assistant Complexities", in Designing Interactive Systems Conference, New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2022, pp. 1512–1524.
Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{Shorter22,
author = {Shorter, Michael and Minder, Bettina and Rogers, Jon and Baldauf, Matthias and Todisco, Aurelio and Junginger, Sabine and Ayta\c{c}, Aysun and Wolf, Patricia},
title = {Materialising the Immaterial: Provotyping to Explore Voice Assistant Complexities},
year = {2022},
isbn = {9781450393584},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533519},
doi = {10.1145/3532106.3533519},
abstract = {Voice assistants (VAs), typically promoted as omniscient conversational butlers, still remain below users’ expectations. Interaction designers seem to struggle bringing in user perspectives necessary to develop more meaningful VA applications beyond simple use cases such as playing music. One of the reasons might be the immateriality of cloud-based VA technology making it difficult to comprehend such complex and ever-evolving systems. In this paper, we investigate provotyping as a design tool for ‘materialising the immaterial’. In our case study, teams of multidisciplinary experts devised twelve provotypes to explore intangible VA technology. We present and discuss three generalisations in respect to the role of provotypes for the exploration of VAs. Our findings show provotypes can serve as the necessary props by which we can bring in missing perspectives around this technology and generate material which enables designers to speculate, debate, and sketch out ideas for meaningful futures of VA applications.},
booktitle = {Designing Interactive Systems Conference},
pages = {1512–1524},
numpages = {13},
keywords = {Research Through Design, Prototyping, Speculative Design, Provotyping, Artificial Intelligence, Voice Assistants},
location = {Virtual Event, Australia},
series = {DIS '22}
}