Senito
Design question:
How can the design of shared objects promote sharing cultures?
Introduction
Community sharing encourages resourceful, socially active lifestyles that challenge current economic models based on extraction and exploitation. Earlier designs for supporting sharing communities mainly focus on digital platforms and physical sharing locations, relying on members to foster a sharing culture. This research investigates a new sociotechnical opportunity: how shared objects can serve as design sites and act as agents to promote sharing. Senito, a cordless drill concept, was designed to promote sharing through speech and movement. An initial test involved a Wizard of Oz approach and 14 members of sharing communities. The test suggests that the agency of shared objects can be leveraged to foster accountability, strengthen community ties, and facilitate knowledge sharing. The findings and design process are summarised in an academic publication published in DIS.
* I want to clarify that Senito is only a conceptual prototype with basic computing features that simulate life-like behaviour. It does not contain any AI models, as explained on the following page.
Design concept provenance
At the start of this project, I ran an ideation workshop with 13 members from different sharing communities, including local tool libraries and makerspaces, to invite community members to identify design opportunities for fostering sharing culture practices. This ensured our exploration of leveraging shared objects to foster sharing culture was situated in the local context. We asked the workshop participants to reflect on what they value in their communities and to co-speculate how these values might manifest through technology in the future. At the time of the ideation workshop, we did not consider leveraging the agency of shared objects to foster sharing cultures and focused more broadly on future technological speculations.
One suggestion from a participant was to equip shared tools, like drills and hammers, with AI that can communicate directly with members to encourage a sharing culture. I was initially surprised by the idea that AI might not fully align with community values like sustainability and peer engagement. However, while volunteering at a local tool library, I observed that LLM-based AI was already fostering interactions. For example, when a member asked about a DIY project, volunteers would sometimes consult an AI chatbot on their phone to start discussions on whether to follow its suggestions or if anything was missing. This indicated a level of openness within sharing communities to new technologies, as long as they benefit the community. It seems that some members see AI as capable of positively impacting their community. As such, I was inspired by participants' idea of designing shared tools to communicate with members, and chose it as the project focus.
Design concepts
I deliberately configured Senito to process agential capacity in a way similar to humans during human-shared object intra-action. This approach aims to encourage its users to move away from viewing these objects solely as tools and toward seeing them as entities with their own intentions and as active contributors to community sharing. In this sense, we speculate that its users would be more likely to envision scenarios that challenge current intra-actions and the boundary between humans and shared objects.
Senito's agential abilities come from its mobility, powered by its motor, along with its hearing, sensing, and speaking functions. Its physical movement and features are intentionally limited, making it resemble a standard cordless drill. As a counterfactual artefact, Senito moves and looks like a drill, but its speech, hearing, and sensing abilities—similar to a human—add an interactive element that a typical drill doesn't have. In its conceptual design, Senito’s behavior is driven by goals to promote community values, facilitate knowledge sharing, and foster connections among members. It uses its mobility and speech to achieve these goals during interactions with community members.
Design concept delivery
I employed the Wizard of Oz method, where a human operator mimics Senito during user interactions. This reduces technical complexity and environmental impact in developing the counterfactual prototype, and is often used in interaction design for early technology insights.
Specifically, I developed a Senito prototype that can be controlled remotely by a human operator. An Arduino Nano linked to the Arduino cloud allows the operator to manage the drills' movements, while a Bluetooth speaker in Senito enables it to communicate directly with users.
User Engagement
During user engagement, I conducted one-on-one co-speculation sessions with 14 members of local sharing communities in Scotland, each lasting 45 to 60 minutes. Each session comprised three activities designed to help participants imagine how a shared object like Senito could influence community sharing practices:
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The first activity involved participants inserting a screw into wood while working with Senito, based on a script mentioned earlier. This provided a bodily experience of working with Senito and understanding its agential capacity during intra-action.
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The second activity was a semi-structured interview to explore participants' feelings about Senito after their intra-action.
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The third activity allowed participants to choose a mode of expression—sketches, Lego, or writing—to speculate on how shared objects like Senito might change community sharing. Combining the second and third activities offered initial insights into participants’ perceptions of their potential relationship with shared objects and how intra-action could reshape community sharing.
Findings
Senito in fostering accountability
Initial user engagement suggested that participants might take greater accountability towards Senito after acknowledging it as an active performer of sharing.
Senito in supporting of knowledge sharing
Participants speculated that Senito could play a key role in facilitating knowledge sharing within a community.
Senito in fostering human connection
Some participants speculated that Senito could potentially be assigned a social role in helping people get to know each other.