Understanding and Designing Automation with Peoples' Wellbeing in Mind

TL;DR

This paper investigates the experiential costs of everyday automation and proposes design strategies to balance automation benefits with user wellbeing through four empirical studies.

Contribution

It introduces new insights into how automation impacts user experience and offers design principles to enhance wellbeing in automated systems.

Findings

Automation can have experiential costs affecting wellbeing

Design strategies can mitigate negative impacts of automation

Empirical evidence supports tailored automation design

Abstract

Nowadays, automation not only dominates industry but becomes more and more a part of our private, everyday lives. Following the notion of increased convenience and more time for the "important things in life", automation relieves us from many daily household chores - robots vacuum floors and automated coffeemakers produce supposedly barista-quality coffee on the press of a button. In many cases these offers are embraced by people without further questioning. Of course, automation frees us from many unloved activities, but we may also lose something by delegating more and more everyday activities to automation. In a series of four studies, we explored the experiential costs of everyday automation and strategies of how to design technology to reconcile experience with the advantages of ever more powerful automation.