How categories come to matter

Abstract

In a study of users' interactions with Siri, the iPhone personal assistant application, we noticed the emergence of overlaps and blurrings between explanatory categories such as "human" and "machine." We found that users work to purify these categories, thus resolving the tensions related to the overlaps. This "purification work" demonstrates how such categories are always in flux and are redrawn even as they are kept separate. Drawing on STS analytic techniques, we demonstrate the mechanisms of such "purification work." We also describe how such category work remained invisible to us during initial data analysis, due to our own forms of latent purification, and outline the particular analytic techniques that helped lead to this discovery. We thus provide an illustrative case of how categories come to matter in HCI research and design.

Mapping Perceptions of Humanness in Intelligent Personal Assistant Interaction

“…For instance, our themes could aid in understanding how users frame their experience when compared to human interaction, thereby identifying pros and cons of using humanness as a design metaphor. Striving for humanness is a common guiding principle in speech interface design [3] and a heuristic users frame their experiences through [17,36,38]. A nuanced understanding of how users comprehend their interactions through this heuristic is valuable to inform design decisions.…”

“…In particular, speech system development focuses heavily on emulating human aspects of speech through expressiveness and human-like synthesis [1] or human-based conversational rules and structures [21,26]. This humanness seems to give users expectations as to the type of capabilities that a system may have as a dialogue partner [36,38]. Indeed, incongruence between expectations derived from humanness cues and the realities of interacting with speech-based systems is detrimental to speech interface user experience [17,38,40,45].…”

Performativity in sustainable interaction

“…Perhaps most fundamentally in Suchman's work on interaction as processes of reconfiguratins between human's and machines [32,33]. But also in more applied work such as that of Jaccucci et al on design things [19], Tholander et al on agcency and materiality [35], as well as Leahu's work in affective interaction [21]. The central element of this perspective is that it proposes that design and user actions should be understood as emerging from the intra-actions within a phenomena, rather than from the interactions between different actors and objects.…”

“…To further elaborate on this, let us turn to the influences from the STS research area that we have seen in HCI, such as [21,23,24,31]. The distinction between representational and performative perspectives to technologies, resonates with what Barad argues to be confusion between representation and truth [2].…”

“…We would like to formulate such discrepancies in terms of differences in epistemologies that go beyond aspects that can be addressed by design only. Rather, than seeing these epistemological differences as problems that need to be overcome, they can be seen as design resources that could let us designing technologies that challenge users' pre-conceptions and let designers, as well as users, to experience value-laden technologies in less absolute terms [21].…”