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- Convenors:
-
Stevienna de Saille
(University of Sheffield)
Arne Maibaum (Technical University of Chemnitz)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
In this panel we invite papers which discuss mobilizing STS sensibilities to help transform and make visible the social in social robotics. We are especially interested in qualitative empirical research that examines the positionality and reflexivity of STS scholars ‘in the field’.
Long Abstract:
Recent years have seen growth in the sub-discipline of human-robot interaction (HRI), which draws largely from quantitative psychology. Alongside this has been an explosion of abstract theoretical literature which explores ethics, relations between humans and machines and other aspects of robotics. While such research has its place, both in their own way tend to be detached from the empirical realities of deploying robots ‘in the field’, and from the actual processes of imagining, funding, and building machines with social functions.
In this panel we ask how qualitative empirical research in the field of social robotics can develop scholarship that uses STS sensibilities, paradigms and practices to inform our participation in the making and doing of social robotics. How should the confluence of the robotic, the human and the social be studied as a set of co-constructed potential futures, rather than as pre-set solutions for problems in which neither context, purpose nor users are well defined? What other forms of knowledge production can we utilize as an antidote to instrumental engineering imaginaries, particularly where these claim to be solving societal challenges for vulnerable groups, such as elderly or disabled people? How do we as STS scholars work against technosolutionism, and avoid being co-opted into engineering imaginaries when working on interdisciplinary projects?
We invite papers which discuss these and similar questions about mobilizing STS sensibilities to help transform and make visible the social in social robotics, in ways which can shape and influence the trajectory of engineering projects. We are especially interested in qualitative empirical research that examines the positionality and reflexivity of STS scholars with regard to the study of social robots, as well as those examining the new and experimental forms of normativity and relationality which are beginning to arise around robots and human engagement.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Frederik Vejlin (Aarhus University)
Short abstract:
Based on ethnographic work at a Japanese robotics lab, this paper discusses how experiments in social robotics and HRI can leverage STS sensibilities to engineer unpredictability, embrace uncertainty, and rethink sociality.
Long abstract:
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger once observed that experimental systems “are like spider webs; something will be caught in them, but one does not exactly know what it will be nor when it will come. They are devices for the creation of unprecedented events” (Rheinberger 2015: 168). Earlier, he argued that recursive relations between reproduction and difference, or differential reproduction (Rheinberger 1997: 101), draw out the disruptive but creative potential of experimental surprise. For social robotics and HRI, the tensions between reproduction and difference extend to their disciplinary cores, which largely converge around the reproduction of sociality in robotic systems and the exploitation of differences between humans and robots for experimental purposes. Here, we might expect surprising events to be critical, as the unpredictable complexity of sociality arguably remains an issue for social robots. Yet, recent methodological discussions in HRI seem intent on eliminating surprising sociality from experiments (Innes and Morrison 2021) or rejecting conventional experimentation in favour of ‘HRI in the wild’ (Dautenhahn 2008). In this paper, I argue that neither of these strategies adequately engages the generative potential of HRI experiments as enactments of artificial sociality (Vejlin 2021; 2023). Inspired by Rheinberger and related perspectives on experimental performativity (e.g., Latour 2004; Stengers 2000; Pickering 2018), I draw on ethnographic work at a Japanese robotics lab to explore how HRI might deploy STS sensibilities to engineer unpredictability, embrace uncertainty, and rethink sociality. While challenging to implement, the upshot is an intensification of experimental surprise that carefully subverts reductionism through differential reproduction.
Pallavi Laxmikanth (Australian National University) Alex Zafiroglu (Australian National University) Mina Henein Xuanying Zhu
Short abstract:
We analyze how professional dancers and quadcopter drones moved together with attentiveness and synchrony, communicating through a kinesthetic vocabulary we call a language of lines. We reflect on how this language will impact how we inhabit worlds with other biological and socio-technical agents.
Long abstract:
To better understand liveliness, agency, and rapport among people and robotic socio-technical agents, scholars of Science and Technology Studies, Cybernetics, phenomenology, and more-than-human anthropology advocate for social-relational approaches with specific descriptions of how exactly these relationships develop over time. Here, we present a cybernetic analysis of a contemporary dance production, Lucie in the Sky, in which quadcopter drones and dancers move with attentiveness and synchrony, conveying humour, sadness and even wisdom; betraying that their bodies are unlike. Through two years of multi-sited ethnographic research, we observed how attentiveness and synchrony relied on a careful construction of space and an orientation of agents within the space, relayed through a mutually understandable vocabulary we call a language of lines. Foundational to this language was an intermittently real and a constant spectral 3D grid filling the practice space, encasing all performers, and facilitating a creative lexicon between dance and drone choreographers, who threaded words, numbers, and bodily movements through points, lines, and trajectories to create closeness and connection. Over many months, bodies began to fold in the coordinates of the space; lines running through neurons, blood and sinews of muscle, and through circuits, memory-chips and plastic-casing. Bonded by invisible traces, above and beyond what was conveyed through intentional movement, a kinesthetic relationship emerged through shared rules of movement. We share this vocabulary in anticipation of the implications it may have for how people, social robots and other beings inhabit worlds, each’s embodiment and agency more diffuse, overlapping and convergent.
Andrei Korbut (Käte Hamburger Kolleg Aachen Cultures of Research)
Short abstract:
The paper considers the application of STS studies of laboratory animals to social robots. Using the case of Pepper robot, it is shown that this perspective is productive but limited and needs to be expanded by other STS studies.
Long abstract:
Pepper Robot is one of the most common tools for generating knowledge about human–robot interaction. There are several possible reasons for its utility, including economic (price), social (humanoid characteristics), and technical (ease of manipulation and programmability). In this paper, I want to show that we can deepen our understanding of Pepper's success as a knowledge-production tool by focusing on its usability as a machine that leads specific “laboratory life”. To do this, I propose to build upon the STS studies of laboratory animals. Pepper and other social robots used in and outside of laboratories to study HRI are similar to laboratory animals in their epistemic value to a particular field. But they are also different from animals. In this paper, based on the analysis of published papers in HRI, that feature Pepper, and available online videos of Pepper’s use in HRI studies, I will show that social robots differ from laboratory animals in two ways: on the one hand, they allow a much closer connection between the object of research and its tool, and on the other hand, they make it possible to “blackbox” their instrumental usability, as Pepper’s strong presence in popular culture attests. In this context, I would like to discuss the productivity and limitations of applying the results of STS studies of laboratory animals to social robotics.
Martin Chevallier (École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS))
Short abstract:
This contribution provides empirical evidence of the amount of human work performed by visitors and store employees to remedy the functional limitations and enact the social character of a robot set up in a department store, then raising methological issues related to the grasp of "interactions".
Long abstract:
Praised as a "champagne expert […] able to answer the most specific questions" by the its sponsors, as an "emotional creature" naturally engaging users in a social interaction by its designers, a robot called Spoon was set up for two months in early 2019 in a Paris luxury department store to provide clients with bilingual information about a special vintage, as part of a broader event mixing cutting-edge technology and luxury branding. This contribution, drawing on lenghty periods of observation, video recordings of human-robot encounters and semi-structured interviews with visitors, focuses on the amount of human work performed by the latter along with store employees to remedy the robot’s "functional limitations and social awkwardness" (Jeon et al., 2020), ranging from mere repetitions to the recruitement of potential users through pre-interactional pathways.
Yet, this maintenance and interactive support was disregarded by the robot’s makers, whose insight on the robot sociality was derived from self-generated analytics (based on data processed by the robot, exclusive of external observational data). Contrasting these analytics with a finer-grained set of ethnographic data, this contribution thus aims at re-inscribe the enactment of robot sociality out of a dualistic framing supported by and supporting these analytics. Finally, it points out a series of methological issues we, as STS scholars, shall confront if they are to embrace the complexity of interactions whose very definition, threshold, temporal boundaries and implicated actors are affected by our spatial standpoint and data collection methods.
Arne Maibaum (Technical University of Chemnitz) Rene Tuma (TU Berlin) Philipp Graf (Hochschule München)
Short abstract:
Video technology is ubiquitous in HRI. However, despite its widespread use, there is no consensus on methodological approaches. As an epistemic tool to make the social visible in social robotics, we advocate videographic analysis as a qualitative methodological insight from STS.
Long abstract:
Video technology is as ubiquitous in experimental HRI settings as it is in robotics in general. Videos are used as communication tools for the general public or funding agencies. Although sometimes deceptive, videos serve as heuristic devices in studies, as proof of concept, or as tools for documentation. Despite the widespread use of video 'in the field', there is little consensus on methodological approaches to using this data.
Drawing on a forthcoming paper, we propose the use of videographic analysis as an epistemic tool in the research process to make the social in social robotics visible - literally. While HRI is technology-driven, it has integrated experimental quantitative methods of psychology in the past. With qualitative videography, we want to add methodological STS knowledge to the epistemic process.
In our talk, we will show why video analysis, with its own set of methodological considerations, is particularly suited to the complex interactions with current robots, which are often characterized by ruptures, expectation violations, and other ambivalences, which are 'repaired' or ignored by the human counterpart.
To illustrate the advantages of the method and to give insights into its application, we draw on examples from our research. We follow the complexity of the situation analyzed from the single experiment in the laboratory to experiments 'in the field'. In addition, we discuss the importance of ethnography for videographic work in HRI in terms of interpreting and making sense of the data recorded and the conception of the video recordings.
Núria Vallès-Peris (Spanish National Research Council - CSIC)
Short abstract:
Exploring the capacity of robots to make things happen through an assembly of relationships that combines the automated and the unpredictable, as well as the robots's magmatic signifier, this presentation analyzes a pilot experience with a feeding robot.
Long abstract:
Based on the patients’ enthusiastic evaluation and experience of a pilot process with a feeding robot in a palliative care hospital that doesn’t work, this presentation begins with the question: Why the enthusiasm and positive evaluation of an artefact that clearly does not function for the task it was designed for?
If we take the framework of autonomy as self-determination and analyze human-robot interaction as a dyadic relationship, given the results the enthusiasm of the patients is incomprehensible. It could also be referred to the Hawthorne effect, which reports the positive evaluation of people participating in experiments. However, this effect also warns that attention is not being properly paid to what explains the phenomena, and therefore, we must integrate new relationships into the analysis.
If we understand the robot as an entity that has the capacity to generate movements and articulate relationships when introduced and/or produces assemblages, and where autonomy in the assemblage is relational, then the scenario changes radically. The robot, due to its magmatic capacity to mobilize imaginaries, meanings, and economic investments, makes different things happen. This does not mean that the robot is nothing, but that it works for different things than those it was designed for. The robot from a dyadic conceptualization is a failure. In contrast, the robot conceptualized as a magmatic artifact designed taking into account its capacity to assemblage the automated and the unpredictable, could open new scenarios for the development of health programs and policies towards care and well-being of patients.
Svenja Breuer (Technical University of Munich) Ruth Müller (Technical University of Munich)
Short abstract:
Public policy shapes emerging fields like HMI, influencing agendas and visions. We analyze German healthcare technology policy, revealing narratives of crisis and tech solutions, alongside aspirations for “good care” and “good work” in healthcare, which we critically discuss.
Long abstract:
Public policy plays an important role in shaping emerging sociotechnical fields like Human-Machine Interaction (HMI), intervening into these innovation spaces not only by allocating public funds and enacting legislation, but also by setting agendas, articulating strategies and visions, and thereby conjuring up collective imaginations of desirable futures. In this presentation, we examine the sociotechnical imaginary of healthcare technology constructed in German public policy, drawing on our analysis of 21 pertinent German policy documents from the years of 2018-2022. Drawing on a conceptual frame of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) and dramaturgical studies of futuring (Oomen et al. 2022), our study provides a critical analysis and discussion of the pervasive storylines in German public policy of healthcare technology. We show how healthcare is imagined as a sector in crisis, how digital, robotic, and AI-enabled technology is promoted as a solution, and how anticipated resistances to technological solutions are being met with the narratives of “technological assistance”, the provision of “good care”, and the facilitation of “good work” within the healthcare sector. However, we argue that, despite its discursive association with good care and good work, the emphasis on technological innovation as the primary solution for healthcare challenges tends to obscure critical determinants of care and work quality. We advocate for pursuing a nuanced understanding of the implications of dominant narratives shaping collective action within fields like HMI in healthcare.
Antonia Krummheuer (Aalborg University)
Short abstract:
We aim to transform shopping practices by building a robot that rejects consumer's shopping choices. Based on our insights from lab-experiments with the robot and video tours of everyday shopping trips, we show how STS can contribute to the making and doing of sustainable transformation in robotics.
Long abstract:
Current consumption technologies mainly support capitalistic ideologies of economic growth and as such seem to hinder more responsible consumption (FN global goals), as for example algorithms and apps that not only help to find a certain product, but also inform about other products for purchase, or current research on service robots that aim to capture and hold the customers attention for sales interaction. How can we change these socio-material practices with the aim for a ‘social -- more sustainable -- good’?
This talk approaches consumption as socio-material practice constructed in the interplay of images of e.g. consumption and sustainability, skills of e.g. doing grocery shopping and food consumption, and materials, e.g. assistive apps (Shove & Pantzar 2005). In the tradition of Suchman’s work (2007) we aim to reconfigure human machine assembles in shopping practices starting by building a robot that negotiates and rejects participants shopping choices (Rehm et al 2024). Therefore, we engage in lab- and ‘in the wild’ experiments with the shopping robot and engaged in collaborative and explorative video tours (Pink 2013) with participants from Denmark to understand their everyday shopping practices. Based on our insights and experiences from this research, this talk discusses how STS can contribute not only to develop a critical perspective on advancing technologies (such as social robots and AI) but also engage in the making and doing of (hopefully more sustainable) transformation.
Stevienna de Saille (University of Sheffield) Temitope Labinjo (University of Sheffield)
Short abstract:
We discuss preliminary findings from a project bringing technicians working on a dressing robot together with local council workers, using LEGO Serious Play to build a 3D map of their care system in order to better understand the context in which such a robot might be deployed.
Long abstract:
This paper discusses preliminary findings from a recent project, “Mapping Trustworthy Systems for RAS in Social Care”, in which we brought technicians working on an early-design stage dressing robot together with council workers involved in commissioning, managing and hands-on provision of adult care services to better understand the context in which such a robot might be deployed. The workshop utilized a live demo of the robot as part of a day-long mapping exercise using LEGO® Serious Play® in which technicians were able to observe the council workers as they built a 3D map of their service as is, and then tried to imagine how a perfected version of the robot might (or might not) be productively integrated. In this paper, I will discuss the main themes arising during this workshop and its subsequent follow-up interviews with participants. How do different conceptions of ‘trust’ and of ‘care’ – as a service, a process or an emotive relationship – inform these discussions? While roboticists tend to focus on producing trust in the robot through technical means, our research shows that for the council participants ‘trust’ was part of a process of making the user feel cared for. Rather than prioritising ‘trust’, we therefore argue (after Tronto and Bellacasa) for a framing of ‘careworthy autonomous systems’, and end by questioning how we as STS scholars might involve roboticists more deeply in these forms of far-upstream qualitative research, which are substantively different than what they are used to from the field of HRI.