Utilization of Speculative Design for Designing Human-AI Interactions

Abstract

Background Understanding artificial intelligence (AI) and contemplating its effects present substantial challenges. A powerful approach to tackling this issue is speculative design (SD), which greatly involves constructing narratives that mobilize discussion on the design and social adoption of technologies. However, research on SD narratives in the context of AI has been scarce. Therefore, this study aims to identify narrative themes in SD that concern human-AI interaction. Methods To begin with, 22 related research cases were collected from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library based on selection criteria. Subsequently, a constant comparative method was employed to analyze the selected research cases, which resulted in 16 narratives. Thereafter, affinity diagramming was conducted to form higher-order categories, resulting in identifying five narrative themes. Results The analysis yielded five narrative themes: 1) AI Revealing its Ways of Learning, 2) Exposing the Creator of AI, 3) Staging Conflict among Users, 4) Situating Users as Hackers, and 5) Betrayal of AI. All five narrative themes were found to create a discursive space about human-AI interaction and to generate design insights that concern the socio-technical issues of AI. Conclusions The findings of this study add understanding to the growing field of critical thinking in human-computer interaction (HCI) research. They provide insights into developing more ready- to-use methodological devices that can stimulate discourse around human experience of AI. It is expected that scholars and practitioners alike may use the findings of this study to apply an SD approach for investigating human-AI interaction.