The Charming Device is an online resource dedicated to fostering the emerging art of digital personality design.
What is a digital personality, you ask?
A digital personality is a sort of real-time character that emerges when you engage with a computing device that relies on a natural-language, conversational user interface.
After decades of brilliant work by countless researchers and programmers, we’re finally at a place where we can begin to communicate with computers using some of the same methods of interaction we use when communicating with our fellow humans.
Before we go any further, let’s just stop for a second and acknowledge that this is nothing short of a modern-day miracle and a science-fiction dream-come-true.
Ok. Thanks.
So virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa are good examples of digital personalities that exist at the moment. But a digital personality doesn’t necessarily require vocal capabilities. Text-based chatbots, like the ones accessible in the Slack messaging app, or Lark’s fitness consulting app also converse with the user and express a personality.
We naturally attribute a personality to every interface we interact with – if it’s easy to use, it seems like a friendly helper, if it’s not, it feels like an annoying pest. Careful crafting of visual elements, and on-screen text can give an app or website a specific personality – in the sense that it conveys a certain attitude. But when a device, or an application begins referring to itself using first-person singular pronouns (“I”,”me”) it takes on the kind of digital personality we’re talking about here.
Why does a digital personality need designing?
By streamlining the input-output process, conversational interfaces can provide us with an intuitive gateway to today’s web services and devices and will be the key to interacting with the driverless cars, smart appliances and and yet-to-be-invented tools that will populate the increasingly-connected world of tomorrow.
But the success of any interface depends, almost exclusively, on how a user feels when they engage with it. Unless you’re facing a critical task with limited options for accomplishment (like paying a parking ticket or signing up for health insurance), your reaction to an interface that fails to meet your expectations will be to simply click the close button and move on.
In the case of a conversational interface – a somewhat novel experience in which a device is calling itself “I” and presuming to have an understanding of human language – the balance between delight and annoyance is quite delicate. As with any conversation, word-choice, tone-of-voice and timing of responses can either keep a relationship moving in a positive direction or cause it to end abruptly, possibly involving things getting smashed. Crafting the relationship between phraseology, functionality and visual feedback in order to form a satisfying user experience will require just as much design attention as all the icons, rollovers and wireframes that have led us to this point.
The ability to converse with computers on familiar, human terms presents us with countless opportunities for technological improvement and innovation. It’s time for us to figure out what we want these digital friends of ours to be like.
About Me
I’m Josh Worth, the editor and creator of The Charming Device.
I’ve been busy working in the world of interactive media since the early 90s. I’ve worked as an interface designer, user experience designer, creative consultant, web strategist, interactive art director, graphic artist, illustrator, and animator on projects for clients like PBS, The American Museum of Natural History, Marvel Comics, Focus Features, and Sony Pictures.
In 2014, I won a Webby Award for “If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A Tediously Accurate Scale Map of the Solar System.” The site has been posted on hundreds of websites, featured in museum exhibits, used as a teaching tool by science educators, and translated into 16 languages.
I’m currently researching and experimenting with digital personality design and am extremely interested in working on a project that involves a conversational interface – particularly one that links up with a cognitive system / deep neural network.
Besides computer-related things, I’m also a writer, playwright, artist and generally curious person.
In 1997, I started a non-profit theatre and arts organization called Trade City Productions as a way to unite my various pursuits and also help other artists present their work. Our latest project is a mobile art and performance space called The Popwagon.
I currently live in the pre-apocalyptic wonderland known as Los Angeles. I’m often accompanied by a fascinating wife, a fancy 7-year-old daughter, a charming 2-year-old son, a cat, and a tortoise.
You can learn more about me on my blog / portfolio at www.joshworth.com.