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Convenient, clean, and efficient?: the experiential costs of everyday automation

Published: 26 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Automation permeates everyday life in the disguise of fully-automated coffee makers, dishwashers, or self-driving cars. While being convenient, such automation may have detrimental effects on the experience gained through the (semi-)automated activity. This paper argues to be more sensitive to the experiential costs of everyday automation. To this end, it provides an in-depth quantitative and qualitative comparison of a more automated and a more manual way of brewing coffee. Brewing coffee manually was more positive and more need fulfilling. This was due to the more intense experience of competence and stimulation. Automation focused people on the outcome. The process became meaningless, degraded to "waiting time." Overall, the experience became "flat", significantly less meaningful and enjoyable, but also less demanding. Automation turned a potentially experience-rich activity into something less satisfactory for the sake of convenience. Since we believe that technology should make everyday activities experientially richer rather than "designing them away," we discuss the emerging challenges for an experiential design of everyday automation.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    NordiCHI '14: Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational
    October 2014
    361 pages
    ISBN:9781450325424
    DOI:10.1145/2639189
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 26 October 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. alienation
    2. automation
    3. experience design
    4. interaction design

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    NordiCHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 89 of 361 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 173 of 702 submissions, 25%

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    • (2024)Responsible Automation: Exploring Potentials and Losses through Automation in Human–Computer Interaction from a Psychological PerspectiveInformation10.3390/info1508046015:8(460)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2024
    • (2024)The Impact of Low-tech Systems on User Experience: First Methodological Reflections around the Urban Biosphere ExperimentProceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 202410.1145/3673805.3673851(1-5)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
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