Learning from the Veg Box: Designing Unpredictability in Agency Delegation

Verame, Jhim Kiel M.; Costanza, Enrico; Fischer, Joel E.; Crabtree, Andy; Ramchurn, Sarvapali D.; Rodden, Tom; Jennings, Nicholas R.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to enable applications that foster a more efficient, sustainable, and healthy way of life. If end-users are to take full advantage of these developments we foresee the need for future IoT systems and services to include an element of autonomy and support the delegation of agency to software processes and connected devices. To inform the design of such future technology, we report on a breaching experiment designed to investigate how people integrate an unpredictable service, through the veg box scheme, in everyday life. Findings from our semi-structured interviews and a two- week diary study with 11 households reveal that agency delegation must be warranted, that it must be possible to incorporate delegated decisions into everyday activities, and that delegation is subject to constraint. We further discuss design implications on the need to support people’s diverse values, and their coordinative and creative practices.

Citation

Verame, J. K. M., Costanza, E., Fischer, J. E., Crabtree, A., Ramchurn, S. D., Rodden, T., & Jennings, N. R. (2018). Learning from the Veg Box: Designing Unpredictability in Agency Delegation. In CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (1-13). https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174021

• Conference Name: ACM CHI 2018 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Conference Location: Montreal, Canada
• Start Date: Apr 21, 2018
• End Date: Apr 26, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Jan 10, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Apr 21, 2018
• Publication Date: Apr 21, 2018
• Deposit Date: Feb 7, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 21, 2018
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2018-April
• Pages: 1-13
• Book Title: CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 9781450356206
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174021
• Keywords: Autonomous Internet of Things (AIoT), agency delegation,breaching experiment, veg box, qualitative study
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/928822
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3173574.3174021
• Related Public URLs: https://chi2018.acm.org/
• Additional Information: Published in: CHI '18 Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Paper No. 447 Montreal QC, Canada — April 21 - 26, 2018 ; ACM : New York, ©2018. ISBN:978-1-4503-5620-6 doi:10.1145/3173574.3174021