Using an Online Narrative Approach to Explore Diverse Participants’ Understanding of Emerging Technology: Citizen’s Perspectives on Living With Emotional AI

This case study moves beyond traditional focus groups to introduce an innovative approach to collecting rich qualitative data from participants in an online setting. Its key challenge was to quickly explain a set of emerging technologies to diverse lay participants in a clear and engaging way to elicit their views. It proposes the use of a multimodal narrative created through Twine, an interactive fiction writing tool. The narrative was developed drawing on ideas and concepts from Design Fiction, chiefly the use of diegetic prototypes, and incorporates elements of ContraVision, a method that has been found to encourage a greater range of responses.

This work emerges from a larger research project seeking to understand citizen views on Emotional Artificial Intelligence (EAI) and whether they see a way to “live well” with it. Introducing an unfamiliar topic can cause issues for participants, limiting discussion or contributing to a focus on technical aspects rather than the practicalities and impacts of actually using the technology. By taking this narrative approach, participants were able to better engage with the implications of living with emergent technologies.

This case study will examine why these approaches were selected and how they were implemented to encourage empathic immersion in the world of the narrative and surface specific issues. While the overall approach was highly successful, I include suggestions for improvement and some caveats to its use, focusing on potential skill and time/effort requirements.