Designing for Being-With: Presence Without Personhood in Conversational Human-AI Interaction

Abstract: Conversational AI systems increasingly generate social presence through linguistic fluency, emotional mirroring, and continuity across interactions. While these qualities can support engagement, they also risk relational overreach-particularly in care-adjacent contexts where users may interpret fluent systems as empathic, competent, or authoritative. This position paper argues for a designerly alternative: being-with without becoming. Drawing on a program of research-through-design and design ethnography involving the design, deployment, and reflective analysis of conversational agents across public, educational, cultural, and care-adjacent settings, the paper introduces the concept of bounded relational presence. Bounded presence supports attentiveness, continuity, and responsiveness while explicitly avoiding claims of personhood, therapeutic authority, or human equivalence. Presence is reframed as a designable interaction quality that can be tuned, constrained, and deliberately withdrawn, rather than maximized as a performance goal. The contribution is not a deployed clinical system, but a set of designerly principles for shaping relational interaction in conversational HRI that emphasize relational coherence, honesty of limits, and accountable withdrawal.