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Short abstract:

MOZART’s Affordance Canvas is a tool to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between SSH and robotic engineering, providing a feminist and critical understanding of usability and sustainability challenges associated with workplace automation in the food sector.

Long abstract:

Insights into the potential socio-cultural impact of technologies are of increasing importance for technoscientific innovation and research. This presentation draws on our work in the EU-Horizon-RIA project “MOZART” (mozart-robotics.eu/) that brings together robotic automation with digital, sustainable workplace transformations in the food industry. We mainly integrate socio-cultural aspects into the project from a feminist perspective. This entails engaging in an interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration across the boundaries between humanities, social sciences, and robotic engineering as much as between academia and industry.

Our presentation will focus on how we assembled perspectives of feminist and integrative research (Haraway 1988, Allen/Sachs 2007, Fischer et al. 2015, D’Ignazio 2016) to implement a living tool for the envisioned collaboration, namely the MOZART Affordance Canvas. The canvas as tool to map socio-cultural implications of technological innovation has emerged from Responsible Research & Innovation. For example, the Ethics Canvas (ethicscanvas.org), developed by the ADAPT research centre, is a collaborative tool to assess ethical concerns in a technological innovation project, combining insights from ethics, computer science, and business development. Our goal was to integrate feminist-critical perspectives and concerns when tailoring such a canvas to our MOZART project.

The Affordance Canvas allows us to bring such perspectives to the forefront of our interdisciplinary work, mainly providing a feminist, critical understanding of usability and sustainability challenges associated with workplace automation in the food sector. We will present this tool and our experiences with it so far, including an outlook for how we will work with it throughout the remaining project.