Paper short abstract:

Documenting fieldwork on a robot designed to facilitate human-machine affection through "emotional" technology, this paper presents moments of affective discordance between anthropologist and engineer to diversify methodological considerations of affect more commonly focused on attunement.

Paper long abstract:

Groove X is one of an increasing number of companies in Japan investing in the production of robots for companionship, care, and comfort during a period in which such forms of affection have been widely declared to be in deficit or "precarious" (Allison 2013). According to Groove X, its signature robot LOVOT is designed for no other purpose than to "warm" and "heal" one's heart. The company's founder, Hayashi Kaname, has further explained that LOVOT offers a way to bring happiness into the relationship between people and machines and increase the amount of love in the world. While Hayashi's startup has dedicated substantial resources to cultivating human-robot affection through narrative technologies, it has also invested in what the company calls its "emotional robotics" technologies, which "stir people's feelings through the ways that the robots look, feel and behave" (lovot.life). Fundamental to creating this capacity for LOVOT to affect human users is the ability for engineers to design compelling solicitations of affection. This requires that engineers test their own embodied perception of a cute (kawaii) aesthetic against dozens of material iterations of the robot's eyes, voice, and body until a majority of staff concur that LOVOT has embodied a sufficiently endearing affective agency of its own. In such sites of affective accommodation between human and machine, robotic platforms serve as what Patricia Clough calls the "virtual surface for the expression of a logic of sensation" (2010). Focusing on the manufacturing of affective feedback through LOVOT design strategies, this paper explores how robotic platforms serve as "virtual surfaces" that both reflect and reproduce communities of robot users through the coordination of sensorial affinities. Based on conversations with LOVOT engineers and workshops that stage human-robot first encounters, the paper documents how technological experimentation not only demarcates communities that share affective sensibilities but also mediates between communities that do not, such as that of robot fan and critic, or interlocutor and anthropologist. Emphasizing moments of affective discordance in addition to accordance, it aims to expand methodological discussions of affect focused more commonly on the generation of knowledge through affective resonance, attunement, and correspondence.