Designing everyday automation with well-being in mind

TL;DR

This paper explores how everyday automation impacts personal well-being, highlighting the experiential costs of automation and proposing design strategies to balance convenience with meaningful experiences.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for considering experiential costs in automation design and demonstrates this through field studies on coffee-making automation.

Findings

Manual coffee-making offers more experiential benefits than automated methods.

Automation can diminish enjoyable and meaningful experiences in daily routines.

Design strategies can help balance automation benefits with experiential quality.

Abstract

Nowadays, automation not only permeates industry but also becomes a substantial part of our private, everyday lives. Driven by the idea of increased convenience and more time for the "important things in life," automation relieves us from many daily chores - robots vacuum floors and automated coffee makers produce supposedly barista-quality coffee on the press of a button. In many cases, these offers are embraced by people without further questioning. However, while we save time by delegating more and more everyday activities to automation, we also may lose chances for enjoyable and meaningful experiences. In two field studies, we demonstrate that a manual process has experiential benefits over more automated processes by using the example of coffee-making. We present a way to account for potential experiential costs of everyday automation and strategies of how to design interaction with automation to reconcile experience with the advantages of a more and more powerful automation.