Designing everyday automation with well-being in mind
This addresses the issue of balancing convenience with well-being in automation design for general users, offering incremental insights into experiential costs.
The paper tackles the problem that everyday automation may reduce enjoyable experiences, and through two field studies on coffee-making, demonstrates that manual processes have experiential benefits over automated ones.
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.