Dark Potentials in Smart Environments

Manipulative and intrusive technologies are directly or indirectly responsible for many significant issues faced today, including misinformation, prejudice and violence, and issues with health and wellbeing. Content platforms show hyper-targeted content that reinforces people’s existing biases - sometimes leading them towards harmful, extremist views on society and politics (Chakrabarti). Manipulative interfaces can make digital products extremely addictive, using psychological tricks to keep people engaged and encourage repeated usage (Harris). Many of these persuasive and privacy-intrusive patterns appear in technology-enhanced physical spaces, or 'smart environments'. The extensive use of facial recognition, tracking of people in shared spaces, and persuasive advertisements and interactions bring issues of ethics to smart environments (Lin). The potential for technologies to be harmful is often overlooked or undervalued by designers and technologists in general. This is evidenced by opinions from designers of addictive social media applications, as they move towards curtailing or avoiding their use of these media (Breland). As smart technologies grow prevalent in people’s public and private environments, it is increasingly important for technologists to build an understanding of the harmful possibilities enabled by their work and products. This thesis aims to explore manipulative and intrusive possibilities in technology-enhanced spaces. It follows a methodology of provocation-led workshops to help designers become familiar with technologies in these spaces. Through these workshops, participants are encouraged to identify potential for benefit and harm in scenarios they create, and become familiar with terminology that can help identify and communicate this potential in their work going forward. The outcomes of these workshops contribute to a growing online collection of examples of manipulative and intrusive smart environments. This resource is intended to further build awareness and understanding around these issues, and serve as a reference for technologists, researchers, policy-makers and other interested parties in the future.