Paper short abstract:

This contribution addresses the role of experimentation in digitalisation by focusing on different practices and their impact on knowledge. It explores the dynamic of experimental research and practices by examining three different contexts: synthetic psychology, HRI and the reconfiguration of work.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution considers the dynamics of digitilisation by focusing on experimentation and by adopting an ethnographic approach. It will address experimentation as a privileged means for two important actors in digitalisation: computer science and robotics. It will try to show that experimentation involves various practices that have an impact on the production of knowledge in the fields of science and technology.

Since the advent of the experimental sciences pioneered by Claude Bernard, scientific experimentation has become more or less widespread across a range of practices outside the field of science. From literary experimentation (as in the work of Emile Zola) to the social experiments at the end of the 19th century (as in the case of Charles Fourier), a dynamic is at work, which instructs different fields of knowledge in a somehow iterative and recursive manner.

This contribution will consider this dynamic by exploring experimental practices associated with the fields of computer science and robotics. It will address 1/ artificial intelligence as an experimental modality for modelling intelligence (synthetic psychology); 2/ experimentation in human-robot interaction (HRI); 3/ experimentation of new modalities of cooperation with intelligent machines in an industrial production setting where socio-material configurations are tested by integrating them directly into professional practices.

Based on case studies, this contribution will describe the role of experimentation in digitalisation. It will also show that, in the fields of computer science and robotics, experimentation is not very far from Zola's experimental novel: a kind of general enquiry into nature and human.