ドミニク・チェン Dominique ChenOur paper "Fermenting Entanglements: Designing for Mutual Care in the Human-Microbe-AI Triad" (Dominique Chen, Young ah Seong, Kazuhiro Jo) was accepted at DIS 2026 (ACM Designing Interactive Systems, June 2026, Singapore), where we presented it in person.
This study is a Research through Design project that, using the fermenting robot Nukabot as its subject, examines the entanglement among three actors—humans, microbes, and AI—through the lens of an ethics of care. Across a short-term home study and an eight-month longitudinal field study in a science museum and a fermented-food specialty store, we implemented and evaluated a "Fermenting Design Model" in which the AI's voice and vocabulary evolve in response to the microbes' metabolic activity.
As HCI shifts toward a post-anthropocentric paradigm that moves beyond human-centeredness, we propose a form of information technology that fosters care rather than control, and we show that "friction" in animistic representation is essential for sensing the agency of biological and algorithmic others.
