Our Friends Electric
Emerging technologies-such as the voice enabled internet-present many opportunities and challenges for HCI research and society as a whole. Advocating for better, healthier implementations of these technologies will require us to communicate abstract values, such as trust, to an audience that ranges from the general public to technologists and even policymakers. In this research, we show how a combination of film-making and product design can help to illustrate these abstract values. Working as part of a wider international advocacy campaign, Our Friends Electric focuses on the voice enabled internet, translating abstract notions of Internet Health into comprehensible digital futures for the relationship between our voice and the internet. We conclude with a call for designers of physical things to be more involved with the development of trust, privacy and security in this powerful emerging technological landscape. This work was in collaboration with Superflux and was funded by the Mozilla Foundation.
We collaborated with the Mozilla Foundation Open IoT Studio and SuperFlux design agency for the project. The prototypes and film were exhibited as part of Design Museum’s Home Futures show in London, at the IKEA Museum for the Home Futures Exhibition in Älmhult, Sweden and at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna for the 2019 Biennale, ‘Uncanny Values. Artificial Intelligence & You‘.
The work has has been acquired by the European Patent Office (EPO) for their Art Collection. The EPO’s art collection focuses on contemporary work at the intersection of art and science.
Jon Rogers, Loraine Clarke, Martin Skelly, Nick Taylor, Pete Thomas, Michelle Thorne, Solana Larsen, Katarzyna Odrozek, Julia Kloiber, Peter Bihr, Anab Jain, Jon Arden, and Max von Grafenstein. 2019. ‘Our Friends Electric: Reflections on Advocacy and Design Research for the Voice Enabled Internet’. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https: //doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300344