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Our Friends Electric – Reflections on Advocacy and Design Research for the Voice Enabled Internet

Author: Grafenstein, M. v., Jain, A., Thorne, M., Rogers, J. et al.
Published in: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year: 2019
Type: Academic articles
DOI: 10.1145/3290605.3300344

Emerging technologies - such as the voice enabled internet - present many opportunities and challenges for HCI research and society as a whole. Advocating for better, healthier implementations of these technologies will require us to communicate abstract values, such as trust, to an audience that ranges from the general public to technologists and even policymakers. In this paper, we show how a combination of film-making and product design can help to illustrate these abstract values. Working as part of a wider interna- tional advocacy campaign, Our Friends Electric focuses on the voice enabled internet, translating abstract notions of Internet Health into comprehensible digital futures for the relationship between our voice and the internet. We con- clude with a call for designers of physical things to be more involved with the development of trust, privacy and security in this powerful emerging technological landscape.

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Maximilian von Grafenstein, Prof. Dr.

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