Designing everyday automation with well-being in mind
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Designing everyday automation with well-being in mind Holger Klapperich 1
&
Alarith Uhde 1 & Marc Hassenzahl 1
Received: 29 November 2019 / Accepted: 3 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Nowadays, automation not only permeates industry but also becomes a substantial part of our private, everyday lives. Driven by the idea of increased convenience and more time for the “important things in life,” automation relieves us from many daily chores—robots vacuum floors and automated coffee makers produce supposedly barista-quality coffee on the press of a button. In many cases, these offers are embraced by people without further questioning. However, while we save time by delegating more and more everyday activities to automation, we also may lose chances for enjoyable and meaningful experiences. In two field studies, we demonstrate that a manual process has experiential benefits over more automated processes by using the example of coffee-making. We present a way to account for potential experiential costs of everyday automation and strategies of how to design interaction with automation to reconcile experience with the advantages of a more and more powerful automation. Keywords Subjective well-being . Home-automation . Coffee-making . Meaningful experiences . Automation from below
1 Introduction Since the Stone Age, humans make tools. Over the centuries, these tools became more and more powerful and efficient, allowing for new capabilities as well as easing the strains of physical labor. In the second half of the eighteenth century, toolmaking turned gradually into automation, with spinning mules and looms powered by horses, water, and steam. This development was a transfer of labor from humans to machines. However, this was not done primarily to humanize work, but to produce goods more efficiently and profitably. What seemed to disappear from view was that humans make use of the material world not only to survive, but also to carry out projects of self-realization [1]. Work is not only about efficiency,
* Holger Klapperich [email protected] Alarith Uhde [email protected] Marc Hassenzahl [email protected] 1
‘Ubiquitous Design’, Experience & Interaction, University Siegen, Kohlbettstraße 15, 57072 Siegen, Germany
it is also about personal growth and development. Despite this insight, automation made its way from factories into homes and our daily lives. For example, the fully automated toaster supports the busy “housewife” since 1926. Unsurprisingly, not only automation itself, but also related values and beliefs have entered the home: Efficiency became as important in everyday private life as it is in business. However, efficiency may not be especially crucial to domestic comfort. Pillan and Colombo [2] suggested to understand the domestic as “complex context where people experience and express some of the most important and basic dimensions of human existence” ([2], p. 2584). For them, a mixture of “identity,” “emotions,” and “social relations” repres
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