Idiotic agents within home

What is it about?

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are voice-enabled virtual agents providing automated functionality through very specific interactions structured around embedded and cloud-based intelligence. However, concerns related to privacy and data extraction, along with users’ frustration over limited interactions, have rendered them controversial. Their ‘intelligence’ is the main control point through which tech companies turn human life into quantifiable data sold to advertisers. Hence, users are instrumentalized and IPAs become passive tools promoting efficiency or enemies trespassing on users’ privacy. What if IPAs operated beyond such limited automation? Bringing together speculative and inclusive design, I develop an idiotic framework to explore more inclusive interactions, where the ‘user’ is an idiosyncratic human with unquantifiable peculiarities, and the IPA manifests diverse agential capacities. Through participatory methods and a post-human approach, I prioritize creativity and diversity of perspectives involved in IPA design in order to expand human-IPA entanglements.

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