Balancing human agency and object agency

Abstract

Advances in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT) have made it possible for everyday objects to attain agency. However, it is unclear how laypersons perceive the increasingly active artifacts. These perceptions are likely to foreground their future responses to IoT objects as they become relevant actors in the physical world and begin to influence everyday user experience. We conducted an in-depth interview study to investigate individuals' knowledge, attitudes, expectations and concerns relating to IoT technologies. Findings show that affordances such as interactivity and modality can be reconceptualized in order to enhance user perceptions of relatedness with the objects. Different from technology-centric and user-centric approaches, the paper suggests a balance between human agency and object agency by adopting a need-oriented design paradigm when building an integral, self-adjusting, user-relevant archetype of IoT.