Speculative Design Research On De-gendered Al Speaker

Background Design has always been dominated by the human-centered or user-centered paradigm.With the development of intelligent embedded and wireless sensor network technologies,smart objects in the Internet of Things environment gradually possess"autonomous" capabilities.The old paradigm that human beings and their technologies are the centers of natural change is gradually challenged by new philosophical thoughts such as speculative realism and objected-oriented ontology.Faced with the impact of the current technological revolution on social culture and subject existence,we are facing a moment of"human decentralization".Object-oriented philosophy,as a kind of guerrilla metaphysics,tries to walk out of the human-centered worldview,acknowledge the autonomous reality of objects beyond human perception.Problem At present,commercial artificial intelligence speakers(e.g.Amazon Echo,Tmall Genie)are designed and described as products with market appeal and ease of use anthropomorphic technology.Anthropomorphic projective perception makes people project characteristics and abilities that speakers actually don't have,making it almost impossible for smart speakers to be explained as their real existence,but to gain value and meaning from the human perspective.When people anthropomorphic the way the smart speaker works,assigning it the voice and role of a female assistant,exploiting assumptions of female labor in social reality,the artificial system has become a political entity,imitating the preconceived notions of running in daily life,because of the lack of diversity,inclusiveness and gender sensitivity reflect social inequality,discrimination,violence,and oppression of values.Method The research uses feminism as a criticism-based methodology to analyze and criticize the phenomenon of gendered technology,and raise the sensitivity of gender issues.Objected-oriented speculative design,as a de-gendered method,identifies design context,generates alternative perspectives,and guides the design process.Both feminism and objectoriented philosophy embody the non-hierarchical decentralized viewpoint and represent a kind of flat ethics.In the research process,firstly,the formation of "gendered" smart speakers is analyzed based on the theoretical research of feminism and object-oriented ontology.Then,the transformation of "materialized" smart speakers are analyzed based on the post-humanism tendency in the current technological environment.After that,this thesis proposes an objectoriented speculative design(OOSD)method based on the quadruple object of Graham Harman and carried out the design practice with its five steps,as an experimental tool to explore the ontological entity of smart speaker,ideate the alternative metaphor of "gendered" smart speaker.The design scheme of de-gendered smart speakers is eventually presented as a hybrid system composed of a natural organism and artificial machines.plants tropism as data-driven factors directly,indirectly through people's attention in the smart speakers into shape the growth pattern of the system,and for the human user,plant,computer allocation between equal role and produce synergies,It shows an alternative design for an object-centric smart speaker.Conclusion This project speculates a post-human ecology through object-oriented speculative design.To achieve de-gendered requires stepping out of antagonistic dualism,embodying a centerless flat ontology,and requiring a multi-agent design approach that extends the smart speaker system to a wider range,embedding the perspectives of other non-human species into the system,and pushing humans into the dominant center of the action.This process involves multi-agent participation,including objects as diverse as humans,non-human agents and technology.Among them,technology acts as an intermediary to link the continuous feedback loop of information between objects.By constructing mixed and dynamic environments that combine living and inanimate objects,complex interactions between objects occur in cross-species social networks,forming surrogate causality,and thus tracking new epistemological configurations.Relative to the human-centered rhetoric is trying to explore human users from the perspective of anthropomorphic,gender relations with smart speakers,object-oriented rhetoric to the smart speakers were discussed from the point of view of all objects how to exist and work,to create a more inclusive and less observer centered approach to design smart speakers.Significance By exploring the autonomous reality of smart speakers beyond human perception,the project designs a smart speaker beyond the "human perspective",and puts forward speculative and critical thinking on human dominance and anthropocentrism bias brought by human-computer interaction(HCI)research.The transition from human-centered to object-oriented represents a new Anthropocene narrative.The integration of living biomaterials into HCI extends the boundaries of traditional HCI and improves sustainability and ecological performance in HCI,an attempt to overcome the traditional dichotomy between natural and artificial.This research has great significance to arouse people's questions about the role of smart speakers as technological hardware in society,design motivations and results.It highlights the role of smart speakers play between different objects in the world,brings ethical issues to the forefront of people's consciousness,and influences people's actions by triggering thinking.