From Rights to Rites: Expectations Management in Smart-Home AI
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866913063054082048 |
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| author | Vishwarupe, Varad Flechais, Ivan Jirotka, Marina Shadbolt, Nigel |
| author_facet | Vishwarupe, Varad Flechais, Ivan Jirotka, Marina Shadbolt, Nigel |
| contents | Domestic voice assistants and smart-home devices are increasingly embedded in everyday routines, yet their ethics are often treated as an afterthought or delegated to compliance teams. To explore how expectations about smart-home AI are constructed and managed, we conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with designers, developers, and researchers from major smart-home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Azure IoT, and Google Nest). Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we develop Expectations Management (EM): a culturally embedded model describing how practitioners shape, calibrate, and repair expectations by balancing organisational rights with culturally situated rites. We show that EM differs from expectation-confirmation theory and trust-calibration by foregrounding moral judgement, situated action, and cross-cultural variation. Our analysis reveals four recurring design tensions: automation vs. autonomy, helpfulness vs. intrusiveness, personalisation vs. predictability, and transparency vs. obscurity and distils them into a five-phase EM Design Playbook that supports moral prudence. We discuss implications for responsible smart-home design and offer guidance for human-centred AI. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_23635 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | From Rights to Rites: Expectations Management in Smart-Home AI Vishwarupe, Varad Flechais, Ivan Jirotka, Marina Shadbolt, Nigel Human-Computer Interaction Artificial Intelligence Information Retrieval Machine Learning Domestic voice assistants and smart-home devices are increasingly embedded in everyday routines, yet their ethics are often treated as an afterthought or delegated to compliance teams. To explore how expectations about smart-home AI are constructed and managed, we conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with designers, developers, and researchers from major smart-home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Azure IoT, and Google Nest). Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we develop Expectations Management (EM): a culturally embedded model describing how practitioners shape, calibrate, and repair expectations by balancing organisational rights with culturally situated rites. We show that EM differs from expectation-confirmation theory and trust-calibration by foregrounding moral judgement, situated action, and cross-cultural variation. Our analysis reveals four recurring design tensions: automation vs. autonomy, helpfulness vs. intrusiveness, personalisation vs. predictability, and transparency vs. obscurity and distils them into a five-phase EM Design Playbook that supports moral prudence. We discuss implications for responsible smart-home design and offer guidance for human-centred AI. |
| title | From Rights to Rites: Expectations Management in Smart-Home AI |
| topic | Human-Computer Interaction Artificial Intelligence Information Retrieval Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23635 |