SDEST: Relational Artifacts

在过去的十年里，在计算对象的设计中出现了一种“关系工件”的运动，计算对象被设计成具有情感状态，受对象与人类的交互影响。其中包括为儿童和居家老人设计的数字娃娃，它们还可以兼作健康监测系统。这些系统的设计者将人类和动物的认知模型结合起来，制造出能够从经验中学习并随时间适应的机器。反过来，使用这些机器的体验为用户和设计师提供了强大的“思考对象”，让他们思考自己的大脑是如何工作的，以及作为一个人的特殊之处。该奖项为数据收集提供资金，用于研究由关系人工制品引起的一系列心理、文化和伦理问题。研究者将探索并记录“第一次接触”相关人工制品的群体的经历：设计师、儿童、“早期采用者”和老年人。研究方法包括人种学田野调查、观察和访谈；地点包括学术和公司实验室、儿童课后项目、老年人住房和个人受试者的家。采访和观察将被录音和记录；研究结果将在已发表的论文、会议报告和专著中传播。该项目的研究者已经就这一课题展开了初步的试点研究。她提出，这种新型计算对象会在人们对诸如“情感”、“关系”和“活力”等品质进行分类和赋值的方式上引发惊人的变化。一个人与一个互动的、不断进化的、“有爱心”的机器之间的动态关系，与一个人与另一个人、一只宠物或一个珍爱的无生命物体之间的关系不同。这个研究项目将探索这种新型关系的本质和含义。它的目标是更好地理解关系人工制品的经验是如何影响人们对他们是谁以及他们在世界上的位置的感觉的。

In the past decade, there has been a movement in the design of computational objects toward "relational artifacts," computational objects designed to present themselves as having affective states that are influenced by the objects' interactions with human beings. They include digital dolls for children and for the homebound elderly, for whom they can double as health-monitoring systems. The designers of such systems incorporate models of human and animal cognition and build machines that learn from experience and adapt over time. In turn, experiences with such machines provide users and designers with powerful "objects to think with" about how their own minds work, and about what is special about being a person. This award funds data collection to examine a range of psychological, cultural, and ethical questions raised by relational artifacts. The investigator will explore and document the experiences of the groups having "first contact" with relational artifacts: designers, children, `early adopters', and the elderly. The methodology includes ethnographic fieldwork, observations, and interviews; sites include academic and corporate laboratories, children's after-school programs, elder housing, and individual subjects' homes. Interviews and observations will be taped and transcribed; results will be disseminated in published papers, presentations at conferences, and in a monograph. The investigator for this project has already launched preliminary pilot studies on this topic. She proposes that this new kind of computational object provokes striking changes in the ways people categorize and assign value to qualities such as "emotion," "relationship," and "aliveness." The dynamic between a person and an interactive, evolving, "caring" machine is not the same as the relationship one might have with another person, a pet, or a cherished inanimate object. This research project will explore the nature and implications of this new sort of relationship. Its goal is to better understand how experiences with relational artifacts affect people's sense of who they are and their place in the world.