Designing for Imperceptible Interaction: Coordination Mechanisms in AI-Enabled Product-Service Systems

Imperceptible interaction, typically manifested in the completion of tasks with minimal user awareness of system mediation, constitutes the next frontier of human-computer interaction. Nevertheless, the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and product-service systems (PSS) that makes such interaction remains relatively underexplored. This study investigates how AI reconfigures PSS to realise imperceptible interaction. Drawing on a case study of Midea’s smart-home ecosystem from 2022 to 2024, and employing multi-source data analyzed through text mining and grounded theory, we develop a process model. The findings demonstrate that AI performs rule mapping, network activation, and logic learning, while PSS provides compatible control, flexible connectivity, and agile adaptation. The AI-PSS coupling generates three interaction mechanisms, including simplification, structuring, and subjectivation, that together transform explicit into imperceptible interaction and foster user co-creation. In doing so, the study contributes to advancing the theoretical understanding of how AI-enabled PSS supports the emergence of imperceptible interaction in human-computer interaction research.