Design questions that other people wrangle with regarding socio-technical systems often reveal a lot about people. With the emphasis on self-help and self-management as a money-savings endeavor for education, healthcare, and other aspects of modern life, people have been looking at how to offer sufficient feedback and encouragement to help people self-assess, and further, to help them know when to seek help (and from where).

Some Challenges of Help-seeking

Help-seeking is not as simple of a phenomena as one might assume. People have to make progress in their learning often in spite of their lack of self-awareness, their pridefulness, their personalities and their other limitations. The research on help-seeking is interesting—in terms of how resistant people have been to unsolicited help. People will shut down emotionally if they are approached in a way that offends them.

Help-seeking also involves finding a knowledgeable source and then not being misled by poor information or other manipulations.

Those building help supports that take the form of intelligent agents and AI robots have examined the research about human obstinacy and have started working on designs about how to get robots more able to be responded to.

Advice-Giving Robots

The assumption seems to be if an advice-spewing robot is created well, it could be versioned to deliver information in a range of ways that would be acceptable to people from a range of cultures, backgrounds, personalities, and preferences. The information might be delivered through different persona—given that research has found that people trust avatars that look like themselves more than the ones that look unlike them. Some voices are more comforting than others. It turns out that some voices are more “hectoring” than others, too.

This reminds me of a road trip I took a short while back, and the chaps sitting up front were responding to the GPS device (a British-voice) half-jokingly, “Okay! Okay! Stop nagging!”

And that was for solicited advice.