Conversational Futures: Emancipating Conversational Interactions for Futures Worth Wanting

Title of the Paper

Conversational Futures: Emancipating Conversational Interactions for Futures Worth Wanting

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs), Critical Design, Design Fiction, and Futures Design.
• Keywords: Conversational User Interfaces, Critical Design, Design Fiction, Futures Design, Postcolonial Theory, Gender and Technology, Digital Colonialism, Child Participation in Design, Multispecies Design, Anthropocentrism.

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Problems or Challenges:

  • Current conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are predominantly task-oriented, relying on request-response interactions, which limits conversational diversity and creative potential.
  • CUIs perpetuate gender biases, digital colonialism, and exclusivity (e.g., inability to recognize stuttering or multilingualism).
  • Existing technical design structures fail to consider diverse future stakeholders, such as children and yet-to-be-born species.
  • CUIs influence power dynamics in family interactions, yet their designs neglect the equality of multiple participants.

• Significance:

  • CUIs have profoundly shaped human-technology interactions, influencing not only current interactions but also future societal norms through their design.
  • There is a need to break away from existing norms to design inclusive technologies that drive societal change on macro issues such as gender discrimination and environmental crises.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • The motivation of this study is to challenge the existing design frameworks of CUIs and propose changes through design fiction, critical design, and interdisciplinary approaches.
  • Building on prior work in the field of voice interaction technologies, this research extends studies on gender neutrality, digital decolonialism, and child interaction.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Solution:

  • Reposition CUIs as tools for envisioning futures (as probes for "co-speculating" with the future) rather than merely discussing the future of technology itself.
  • Employ design fiction and critical design methods to construct diverse conversational scenarios that challenge current technological norms.
  • Introduce CUIs as conduits for dialogue involving multispecies and human futures, exploring complex societal issues such as gender equality and climate crises.

• Innovative Aspects of the Solution:

  • Transform CUIs from functional tools into materials for critical design, exploring how to embed polyphonic dialogues into technology.
  • Use perspective shifts and hypothetical scenarios to help participants reflect on how technological extensions shape personal and societal futures.
  • Incorporate the voices of children and non-human species as significant contributors to future design, a perspective often overlooked in traditional design.

• Implementation Steps and Techniques:

  1. Rain Exploration: Design a critical CUI to simulate how technology embodies "paternalistic control" and gender bias issues.
  2. CUI PeerPlay Exploration: Apply co-design methods, allowing children to role-play as future species or CUIs to create dialogues and participate in design.
  3. Refowering Self Exploration: Develop a design fiction scenario where participants converse with their "future selves" (embodied through eco-friendly designs, such as flowers or fungi) to discuss the impact of climate crises on individuals and society.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes:

  • Rain Exploration: Demonstrated how critical CUI design can help participants reflect on the boundaries of technological interventions and identify technological toxicity (e.g., how technology controls users).
  • CUI PeerPlay Exploration: Showed how children deepen their understanding of future technologies through interactions with CUIs while offering creative suggestions for future designs.
  • Refowering Self Exploration: Provided a novel perspective, enabling participants to recognize the complexity and importance of environmental behavior through simulated conversations.

• Advantages Compared to Existing Solutions:

  • Offers concrete design scenarios that allow participants to directly reflect on complex societal issues through experience.
  • Moves beyond merely improving the functionality of CUIs to propose the possibility of overturning current commercial technological frameworks for critical and inclusive design.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • The Rain study found that participants resisted technology they perceived as "too intrusive," particularly when it replaced personal decision-making.
  • The CUI PeerPlay study revealed that children tend to anthropomorphize CUIs, assigning them social characteristics while expressing their expectations for future technology design.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations include the inability of current critical design methods to directly induce long-term behavioral changes and the need for further exploration of the cross-cultural applicability of design fiction scenarios.
  • Future research could incorporate multicultural contexts and a broader user base to test how CUIs are received by different social groups.
  • There is a need to explore non-anthropocentric design perspectives, delving into deeper considerations of futures that may or may not include humans.

Conclusion

This study proposes a vision of conversational futures, advocating for the use of critical design in CUIs to transcend existing societal norms and embrace diverse future voices. Design fiction and critical methods are presented as essential tools for reimagining CUIs as platforms for co-creating future dialogues, fostering a closer connection between present realities and envisioned futures.