Experiencing the Future Mundane: Configuring Design Fiction as Breaching Experiment

2024-04-29

AI Summary

This study investigates latent barriers to the social acceptance of emerging technologies in everyday practice. Method: We propose a novel “design-based breaching” methodology, integrating design fiction with Goffmanian breaching experiments from ethnomethodology. By deliberately disrupting default expectations in mundane contexts—such as television viewing—we expose the tacit social rationalities underpinning technological embedding. The approach combines participatory observation, situated narrative construction, and user immersion analysis. Contribution/Results: Applying this method to smart adaptive media, we identify six distinct categories of latent acceptance challenges. The methodology effectively deconstructs taken-for-granted technological expectations, offering both strong theoretical explanatory power and cross-contextual transferability. It establishes a new paradigm for studying socio-technical acceptance, bridging design research, science and technology studies (STS), and human-computer interaction (HCI).

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• Social Networks and Social Media: Socio-technical web-based systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel methodological approach for surfacing the acceptability and adoption challenges that confront future and emerging technologies from the perspective of mundane action, in which they will ultimately be embedded and used. This novel approach configures design fiction as a breaching experiment to surface taken for granted background expectancies that are fateful for acceptability and adoption. We explain the logic of this new interdisciplinary method and present a concrete case to demonstrate its viability: a design fiction called Experiencing the Future Mundane (EFM), which depicts a future world in which watching TV is driven by smart adaptive media. We explicate the design of the EFM, how it was configured to breach common sense knowledge and surface taken for granted background expectancies concerning how watching TV works and is expected to work, the acceptability and adoption challenges that emerge from user engagement with the experience, and how this novel approach may be adopted more broadly.

Problem

• Future Technologies
• User Acceptance
• Adoption Challenges

Innovation

• Design Fiction
• Breaching Experiment
• Technology Acceptance