Domestication of an AI platform

The ongoing digitalization and proliferation of smart home technologies—exemplified by smart speakers such as Amazon Echo with Alexa—are increasingly shaping everyday life in private households. Despite more than 100 million Alexa installations worldwide, there is still little design-ethnographic research on the integration and use of these technologies, particularly within student life-worlds. 

This research project investigates how students integrate smart speakers into their daily lives, especially in light of current AI revolutions, and which social and cultural factors influence this process. To this end, we combine the domestication approach with methods from design ethnography—specifically, Cultural Probes.

Student living environments are often temporary and liminal spaces in which young adults find themselves in a transformative phase of life. Especially for so-called “digital natives”, specific conditions of technology acceptance apply, which are to be determined within the domestication process to be examined. 

Smart speakers play an influential role both in communication between household members and the outside world, as well as in the relationships within a household. The domestication approach offers a theoretical model to describe cultural dynamics in the process of media appropriation. The study investigates not only whether students functionally integrate smart speakers, but also whether they attribute changed meanings and roles to them in the process of appropriation.

Within the methodology of design ethnography, the research project intervenes in students' life worlds through the introduction of an Amazon Echo with Alexa and the use of cultural probes, in order to access implicit knowledge/phenomenological everyday knowledge and to make this knowledge explicit. This research practice requires an ongoing reflection on the method itself, as well as on the design of the method.