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.
