everydAI - An AI assistant supporting balance between work and personal activities to increase wellbeing in the home office

Abstract

This project explored the domain of the home office worker to shape an AI driven concept guided by positive design principles to increase subjective wellbeing and resolving problems related to working from home. The 13 fundamental needs, which are an operationalisation of the positive design framework, are used as components for subjective wellbeing. Research and interviews with both managers and home office workers have shown that people working from home experience difficulties to detatch and take effective breaks, feel guilty for doing personal things during office hours, and lack routines to structure their day. Exploring possibilities to use AI as an integral part of a product design addressing these problems have shown that recent developments in natural language processing make it possible to process and work with abstract human concepts. Two interaction concepts were tested to gauge promising concept directions and explore possibilities of how to intervene in people‘s established routines. Co-creating use cases for AI to act in a product to increase work/life balanece, combined with previous ideas and insights have led to the final concept vision. The final concept vision is an AI driven to-do list concept which helps users to maintain work/life balance by giving personalised tips and suggestions for balancing activities and informing people about their fundamental need fulfilment. It is a concept vision leveraging the capabilities of natural language processing to classify human tasks, learn form behavior and personal data and give users individual suggestions tailored to their needs and interests. The concept vision was tested with home office workers in real-life conditions for one week using a „Wizard of Oz“ prototype. Evaluations of the prototype have shown interesting insights into the perception of receiving personal suggestions from a machine and a promising response to the concept. Especially regarding needs classification and tracking triggered curiosity and left users wanting to know more about their need fulfilment pattern. The concpet offers the starting point for the use of AI for the human good using fundamental needs and subjective wellbeing at the core.