Robotic Futures: Learning about Personally-Owned Agents through Performance

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Agents that support spoken interaction (e.g., Amazon Echo) are designed for social spaces like the home, yet designers know little about how they should respond to social activity around them. We set out to reconsider current one-on-one interactions with agents, and explore the design space of future socially sophisticated agents. To do so, we use an iterative co-design process with designers and theatre experts to devise an immersive performance, "Robotic Futures." Theatre is a form of knowing through doing—by examining the interactions that persisted in the devising process and those that fell through, we conclude with a proposition for design considerations for future agents. Based on emerging research in this space, we focus on the characteristics of personally-owned agents in comparison to shared agents, and consider the roles and functions each introduce in their integration in the home.