Abstract
As artificial intelligence evolves into agentic, adaptive, and generative systems, design research faces an epistemic shift. AI assistants, once reactive interfaces, are increasingly experienced as proactive presences that shape everyday life. This transformation reframes trust, no longer limited to technical reliability, transparency, or explainability, but also emerging as a relational and experiential phenomenon formed through interaction. While industry emphasizes technical trust, including privacy, security, and system reliability, design research must also address experiential trust, a felt confidence grounded in the lived quality of human and AI coexistence. Focusing on the smart home as a case of everyday domestic life, where these dynamics are visible, this paper introduces an experiential trust paradigm that repositions trust as an embodied, relational process. It contributes a framework for design research in the age of agentic AI by distinguishing experiential trust from technical trust and proposing new directions for designing trustworthy, co-living AI companions.
Keywords
Agentic AI, Experiential Trust, Trust in AI, Design Research
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2658
Citation
Moon, J. (2026) Co-living with agentic AI: Reframing design research for experiential trust in everyday domestic life, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2658
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Co-living with agentic AI: Reframing design research for experiential trust in everyday domestic life
As artificial intelligence evolves into agentic, adaptive, and generative systems, design research faces an epistemic shift. AI assistants, once reactive interfaces, are increasingly experienced as proactive presences that shape everyday life. This transformation reframes trust, no longer limited to technical reliability, transparency, or explainability, but also emerging as a relational and experiential phenomenon formed through interaction. While industry emphasizes technical trust, including privacy, security, and system reliability, design research must also address experiential trust, a felt confidence grounded in the lived quality of human and AI coexistence. Focusing on the smart home as a case of everyday domestic life, where these dynamics are visible, this paper introduces an experiential trust paradigm that repositions trust as an embodied, relational process. It contributes a framework for design research in the age of agentic AI by distinguishing experiential trust from technical trust and proposing new directions for designing trustworthy, co-living AI companions.