Message Ritual: A Posthuman Account of Living with Lamp
This work addresses how people interact with AI in domestic settings, offering a novel HCI method for studying human-machine entanglements, though it is incremental in applying existing AI techniques to a new context.
The paper tackles the blurring boundary between humans and digital technologies by introducing Message Ritual, an AI system embedded in a lamp that listens to home conversations, generates poetry from key topics, and sends it via SMS, with participants in four households using it over two weeks to explore memory reframing.
As we become increasingly entangled with digital technologies, the boundary between human and machine is progressively blurring. Adopting a performative, posthumanist perspective resolves this ambiguity by proposing that such boundaries are not predetermined, rather they are enacted within a certain material configuration. Using this approach, dubbed `Entanglement HCI', this paper presents \emph{Message Ritual} -- a novel, integrated AI system that encourages the re-framing of memory through machine generated poetics. Embodied within a domestic table lamp, the system listens in on conversations occurring within the home, drawing out key topics and phrases of the day and reconstituting them through machine generated poetry, delivered to household members via SMS upon waking each morning. Participants across four households were asked to live with the lamp over a two week period. We present a diffractive analysis exploring how the lamp \emph{becomes with} participants and discuss the implications of this method for future HCI research.