Title
Does Siri Have a Soul? Exploring Voice Assistants Through Shinto Design Fictions
Abstract
It can be difficult to critically reflect on technology that has become part of everyday rituals and routines. To combat this, speculative and fictional approaches have previously been used by HCI to decontextualise the familiar and imagine alternatives. In this work we turn to Japanese Shinto narratives as a way to defamiliarise voice assistants, inspired by the similarities between how assistants appear to 'inhabit' objects similarly to kami. Describing an alternate future where assistant presences live inside objects, this approach foregrounds some of the phenomenological quirks that can otherwise easily become lost. Divorced from the reality of daily life, this approach allows us to reevaluate some of the common interactions and design patterns that are common in the virtual assistants of the present.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3334480.3381809
CHI '20: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Honolulu HI USA April, 2020
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
Voice Assistants, Design Fiction, Critical Design, Shinto
Conference
978-1-4503-6819-3
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.34
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
William Seymour16178.16
Max Van Kleek254258.95