From Rights to Rites: Expectations Management in Smart-Home AI
For smart-home AI designers and researchers, this work provides a culturally grounded framework for managing user expectations, addressing a gap in ethical design practices.
Through 33 interviews with smart-home practitioners, the authors develop Expectations Management (EM), a model showing how designers shape user expectations by balancing organizational rights with cultural rites, and identify four design tensions. The resulting EM Design Playbook aims to support moral prudence in smart-home AI.
Domestic voice assistants and smart-home devices are increasingly embedded in everyday routines, yet their ethics are often treated as an afterthought or delegated to compliance teams. To explore how expectations about smart-home AI are constructed and managed, we conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with designers, developers, and researchers from major smart-home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Azure IoT, and Google Nest). Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we develop Expectations Management (EM): a culturally embedded model describing how practitioners shape, calibrate, and repair expectations by balancing organisational rights with culturally situated rites. We show that EM differs from expectation-confirmation theory and trust-calibration by foregrounding moral judgement, situated action, and cross-cultural variation. Our analysis reveals four recurring design tensions: automation vs. autonomy, helpfulness vs. intrusiveness, personalisation vs. predictability, and transparency vs. obscurity and distils them into a five-phase EM Design Playbook that supports moral prudence. We discuss implications for responsible smart-home design and offer guidance for human-centred AI.