Landscaping personification technologies: from interactions to relationships

Benyon, David; Mival, Oli

Abstract

Personification technologies are technologies that encourage people to anthropomorphize. These technologies try to get people to form relationships with them rather than simply interact with them. They may do this through having behaviours that encourage people to attribute personality or emotion to them. They may be persuasive technologies in the sense of Fogg that aim to get people to do things they would rather not do. They may promote trust. The convergence of a number of technologies is making personification technologies possible. Speech as an interaction is finally becoming robust and useable and is very influential in people attributing intelligence to devices and systems. Human language technologies allow devices to understand, or appear to understand, conversation. Interactions are becoming more natural and engaging. Avatars appear more congenial and coordinated.

Building on the experience of a previous project, and drawing on the experience of a four year multi-disciplinary project, called Companions, the authors are keen to build community relationships around the notion of personification technologies. This includes the design, engineering, research (including ethics and social issues) and usability communities.

Citation

Benyon, D., & Mival, O. (2008, April). Landscaping personification technologies: from interactions to relationships. Presented at Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '08

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (Published)
• Conference Name: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '08
• Start Date: Apr 5, 2008
• End Date: Apr 10, 2008
• Publication Date: 2008
• Deposit Date: Jun 22, 2010
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 22, 2010
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 3657-3662
• Book Title: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, presented at CHI 2008, Florence, April 2008.
• ISBN: 160558012X
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1358628.1358908
• Keywords: Personification technologies; affective interaction;human language technologies; designing forrelationships; multimodal interaction; Companions
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/3779
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1358628.1358908
• Contract Date: Jun 22, 2010