Anthropomorphizing artificial intelligence: towards a user-centered approach for addressing the challenges of over-automation and design understandability in smart homes

ABSTRACT Smart home, as a comfort and leisure providing equipment/device/object instead of its initial role of to serve, support, monitor and deliver therapy, is facing many challenges towards its successful integration with user's lifestyles. Among the current technical and social challenges – interoperability, reliability, privacy, security, consumer's lack of awareness about its benefits, costs and complexity of technology, maintenance costs, lack of incentive for internet providers etc. – take the lead among many others. Limiting the scope, this paper attempts to address challenges of (a) over-automation – a feeling regarding advanced technologies of being out-of-control, and (b) difficulty in understandability of equipment's/device's/object's design – users must be straight-forwardly able to operate them without any particular operational knowledge. Literature from the disciplines of artificial intelligence (hereinafter AI), product design (industrial engineering), human factors (ergonomics), social psychology, communication and sociology (sociological experiments) have been incorporated in this study to understand the psychology of human thought and cognition, everyday things and designer's ability of utilizing these psychologies and of users for addressing, first, the role that a smart home can play as a leisure equipment/device/object, and secondly, granting its user the control and ease of operability they desire.