  Nowadays, automation not only dominates industry but becomes more and more a
part of our private, everyday lives. Following the notion of increased
convenience and more time for the "important things in life", automation
relieves us from many daily household chores - robots vacuum floors and
automated coffeemakers produce supposedly barista-quality coffee on the press
of a button. In many cases these offers are embraced by people without further
questioning. Of course, automation frees us from many unloved activities, but
we may also lose something by delegating more and more everyday activities to
automation. In a series of four studies, we explored the experiential costs of
everyday automation and strategies of how to design technology to reconcile
experience with the advantages of ever more powerful automation.
