With the development of Artificial intelligence, the connected objects are extended with the predictive capabilities and the character of things can change to “things that predict”. If a connected device is able to embrace a predictive system that not only profiles for scripted behavior but could also use the knowledge co-created by all the other similar devices and their users that encounter similar situations, the predictions can be generated based on that. In this case, a new type of interplay between humans and things called “predictive relation” is created. However, before this future takes place, it is required to find out appropriate patterns to address challenges such as the transparency and users’ acceptance of predictive behaviors of connected products. The research in this article takes a vacuum robot as a reference product for the study. The research starts by collecting users’ daily practice with vacuum robots through 4-day diary booklets. And then the booklets serve as sensitizing tools to envision the possible predictive capabilities and lead the discussion on the acceptance and transparency of general predicting things. From the creative sessions we propose 1) design qualities for the acceptance of the predicting things, and 2) a model of generating predictive behavior that enhances the transparency. Eventually, we also propose the idea of “Designers as the facilitators of the human-robot collaboration”.

Trust is an important factor in building acceptance of autonomous vehicles within our society, but the complex nature of trust makes it challenging to design for an appropriate level of trust. This can lead to instances of mistrust and/or distrust between users and AV’s. Designing for calibrated trust is a possible option to address this challenge. Existing research on designing for calibrated trust focuses on the human machine interaction (HMI), while from literature we infer that trust creation beings much before the first interaction between a user and an AV. The goal of our research is to broaden the scope of calibrated trust, by exploring the pre-use phase and understand the challenges faced in calibration of trust. Within our study 16 mobility experts were interviewed and a thematic analysis of the interviews was conducted. The analysis revealed the lack of clear communication between stakeholders, a solutionism approach towards designing and lack of transparency in design as the prominent challenges. Building on the research insights, we briefly introduce the Calibrated Trust Toolkit as our design solution, and conclude by proposing a sweet spot for achieving calibration of trust between users and autonomous vehicles.

The smart city infrastructure will soon start to include smart agents, i.e., agentic things, which co-exist and co-perform with human citizens. This near-future scenario explores the flexible types of collaborations and relationships between the human and nonhuman citizens. Drawing on current technology forecasts and AI/robotics literature, we created five fictional concepts for reflecting on themes we deem important for such collaborations: responsibility, delegation, relationship, priority, and adaptation. The promises, challenges and threats of these themes are discussed in this paper, together with the new questions that were opened up through the use of design fiction as a method.