Proud and happy to announce that our toCHI paper about designing intertwined human-computer integrations has been accepted for publication. It is still in press, though. But I will post it here as soon as it is released!
Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller, Nathan Semertzidis, Josh Andres, Joe Marshall, Steve Benford, Xiang Li, Louise Petersen Matjeka, & Yash Mehta. 2022. Towards Understanding the Design of Intertwined Human-Computer Integrations. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. In press, December (2022)
Abstract
Human-computer integration is an HCI trend in which computational machines can have
agency, i.e. take control. Our work focuses on a particular form of integration in which the
user and the computational machine share agency over the user’s body, that is, can
simultaneously (in contrast to a traditional turn-taking approach) control the user’s body.
The result is a user experience where the agency of the user and the computational machine
is so intertwined that it is often no more discernable who contributed what to what extent;
we call this “intertwined integration”. Due to the recency of advanced technologies enabling
intertwined integration systems, we find that little understanding and documented design
knowledge exist. To begin constructing such an understanding, we use three case studies to
propose two key dimensions (“awareness of machine’s agency” and “alignment of machine’s
agency”) to articulate a design space for intertwined integration systems. We differentiate
four roles that computational machines can assume in this design space (angel, butler,
influencer, and adversary). Based on our craft knowledge gained through designing such
intertwined integration systems, we discuss strategies to help designers create future
systems. Ultimately, we aim to advance the HCI field’s emerging understanding of sharing
agency.
