Artificial Companions for Emotional Support
What if your support dog would be an artificial intelligence? How can be build on the innate human ability of connecting to everyone and everything? If we can develop intimate relationships with a Roomba, why shouldnât we harness that potential? How would such a companion need to be designed to have positive effects, beyond simply imitating humans? And how can artificial companions embody ongoing issues of privacy and data sovereignty?
We need to fundamentally rethink artificial companionship. I propose the founding of a studio space which researches and develops approaches that incorporate ongoing discourses on the post-, non- and more-than-human into the design of technological processes and products.
- Studio as plattform built on Open Source Technology
Why
Technology is not supposed to imitate humans, itâs supposed to augment us. Trying to reproduce human features is limiting technology.
But Laurea Glusman McAllister, a psychotherapist in Raleigh, N.C., warned that because these apps were designed to provide comfort, they might not help people deal with the kind of conflict that comes with real-world relationships. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/technology/chatbots-quarantine-coronavirus.html
Our thoughts and distortions are over generalisations, but a bot itself is an artefact of over generalisation too. - Esther Perell
The concept of digital companions was rapidly adopted and pushed with the private sector. The corona pandemic and the accompanying lockdown furthered this process. From an ethical standpoint I donât want the private sector to run this show, while also believing that the concept is of high value.
From a post-phenomenological standpoint, voice-activated interfaces differ quite drastically from other ways of interacting with a machine, software or an algorithm. I am very interested in this aspect of what technology makes with us, makes out of us; A posthuman perspective.
What do I need
- Guidance for R&D and testing in health sector
- Help with finding and working on the specific question/problem
Animistic Design
- agency, 2) embodiment, 3) a certain ecology of objects and subjects, and 4) uncertainty
Animistic design is characterised by four interwoven principles [3,23,24]. A first key animistic design principle accounts for the way design qualities can evoke a sense of agency. Rather than considering only subjects as active, and objects as passive, animistic design explicitly considers objects on an equal stand with subjects, as all agents that âdoâ things. Agency is not something that objects a priori have; it is not an innate property. Agency is conceptualized as a relational concept instead, as being actualized, embodied in the relationship between the object and the broader ecology in which it is interacting [23:228]. This brings us to the second and third key principle, namely the embodied nature of objects, that act in a broader ecology. The animistic design interest in embodiment as a second key principle draws the attention to how meaning is created, how cognitive processes unfold, and how information is represented, not as purely existing in one agent, but as unfolding in relation to other agents, instead [24:61]. This notion of considering the broader ecology (also coined milieu) in which objects and subjects act upon each other and are entangled, is the third animistic design principle [23,24]. It brings forth a sensitivity to multiple and heterogeneous points of view [3:2254] that emerge when several distinct objects and subjects act upon each other at an equal stand [24]. This ecology is not a controlled and stable, but considered as having a complex, unpredictable, fluid nature instead. The animistic design perspective embraces this power of uncertainty, which can be considered as a fourth principle. Instead of aspiring control and creating pre-defined, predictable human-computer interactions, animistic design embraces the uncertainty that emerges when various agents creatively engage in and co- create different realities.