People's identities change during life transitions, e.g., studying abroad. They bring everyday objects that embody memories and reflect their identities during such moves. To assist in these transitions, we ask how people's human identities could be influenced by their objects through an artificial agent. This paper presents an exploratory research-through-design study around how people undergoing life transitions experience conversing with their everyday objects through a chatbot. Drawing on a two-week field deployment and interviews with 12 participants, we contribute (1) a conceptualization of 'trans-embodiment' describing the asynchronous imagination of object and human identities on the chatbot, (2) empirical evidence of the resulting emotional and reflective experiences, and (3) three types of object identities for designing conversational agents that role-play objects. Our contributions sum up to triangulating human-agent-object identity as trans-embodiment in supporting life transitions.

翻译：在生命过渡期（例如出国留学）中，人们的身份会发生改变。在此类迁移过程中，人们会携带日常物品，这些物品承载着记忆并反映了他们的身份。为了协助这些过渡，我们探讨了如何通过人工代理使人们的物品影响其人类身份。本文围绕经历生命过渡期的人们如何通过聊天机器人与日常物品对话的体验，开展了一项探索性的“通过设计进行研究”的探索。基于为期两周的实地部署和对12名参与者的访谈，我们贡献了：（1）“跨具身化”的概念化，描述了聊天机器人上物体身份与人类身份的异步想象；（2）由此产生的情感和反思性体验的实证证据；以及（3）为设计扮演物体角色的对话代理而提出的三种物体身份类型。我们的贡献总结为：将人-代理-物身份三角关系作为支持生命过渡的跨具身化。