How does automation affect us, our environment, and our imaginations? What actions should we take in response to automation? Beyond grand narratives and technology-driven visions of the future, what more can automation offer?

With these questions in mind, The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures provides a framework for thinking about and implementing automation differently. It consolidates automated futures as an inter- and transdisciplinary research field, embedding the imaginaries, interactions, and impacts of automation technology within their social, historical, societal, cultural, and political contexts. Promoting a critical yet constructive and engaging agenda, the handbook invites readers to collaborate with rather than resist automation agendas. It does so by pushing the agenda for social science, humanities and design beyond merely assessing and evaluating existing technologies. Instead, the handbook demonstrates how the humanities and social sciences are essential to the design and governance of sustainable sociotechnical systems. Methodologically, the handbook is underpinned by a pedagogical approach to staging co-learning and co-creation of automated futures with, rather than simply for, people. In this way, the handbook encourages readers to explore new and alternative modes of research, fostering a deeper engagement with the evolving landscape of automation.

- integrates perspectives at both philosophical and practical levels

- a guide to imaginaries and interactions with automation technology that cuts across different fields

- demonstrates how co-learning and co-creation can be staged and analysed

Digital self-tracking devices and data have become normal elements of everyday life. Imagining Personal Data examines the implications of the rise of body monitoring and digital self-tracking for how we inhabit, experience and imagine our everyday worlds and futures. Through a focus on how it feels to live in environments where data is emergent, present and characterized by a sense of uncertainty, the authors argue for a new interdisciplinary approach to understanding the implications of self-tracking, which attends to its past, present and possible future. Building on social science approaches the book accounts for the concerns of scholars working in design, philosophy and human-computer interaction. It problematizes the body and senses in relation to data and tracking devices, presents an accessible analytical account of the sensory and affective experiences of self-tracking, and questions the status of big data. In doing so, the book proposes an agenda for future research and design that puts people at its centre.

This paper demonstrates the role of pre-product user experience (UX) in product design. For automotive companies, questions concerning how users will experience not yet available products is pressing - due to an increase in UX design for products, combined with a decrease in time-to-market for new products. Conventional UX research provides insights through investigating specific situated moments during use, or users’ reflections after use, yet cannot provide knowledge about how users will engage with not yet existing products. To understand pre-product UX we undertook a netnographic study of three people’s experiences of expecting and owning a Tesla car. We identified how modes of anticipation evolve before using the actual car, through online social interaction, creating a pre-product experience. The study offers a foundation for theorizing pre-product UX as socially generated anticipated UX, as well as insights for UX design in industry. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018.

In this chapter we discuss how automatic wearable cameras are imagined by their designers. Such technologies have most often been approached from a user perspective, which overlooks how developers invest their personal experiences and emotions into the technologies. Focusing on the Narrative clip - a camera that takes a photo every 30 seconds, we show how developers its developers have imagined this camera as a device that enables people to gain access to the assumed authenticity of a recordable world, that exists externally to the human wearing the device. As this example shows, when we account for developers’ visions and imaginations, particular stories emerge. Thus, we argue it is important to account for these and the agency they might have in the possibilities created by automated technologies. © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2016

Self-tracking devices and apps often measure and provide interpretations of personal data in a rather straightforward way, for instance by visualising the speed and distance of a run or the quality of sleep during a night. There is however a growing number of devices that take the data analysis further by providing insights and algorithmic advices about domains of our lives that are otherwise thought of as difficult to grasp. This paper explores two devices of this kind, namely the Moodmetric and the ŌURA which are two recently released smart rings with associated mobile apps that claim to measure emotions and rest, promote happiness and help users to perform better. Whereas several studies have shed light over how users engage with self-tracking apps and devices, little attention has been paid to how these technologies stem from dreams, hopes and imaginaries of designers and developers. This paper approaches self-tracking from a producer perspective in order to frame how users and their everyday lives are imagined by designers and how these assumptions are built into the technologies. Empirically, the paper is based on a content analysis of blog posts, marketing materials and user guides from the ŌURA and Moodmetric companies along with video interviews with company representatives as well as recordings of their public appearances. Engaging with the field of software studies as well as the emerging field of self-tracking studies, this paper aims at providing a basis for further design oriented studies of self-tracking.