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Paper short abstract

Interdisciplinary development of robotic systems in care makes understandings of care visible. Engineers formalize tasks, whereas nurses require "tinkering in practice". These tensions function as epistemic frictions, rendering assumptions negotiable and reshaping interdisciplinary collaboration.

Paper long abstract

Robotic systems for nursing care are increasingly developed and introduced into long-term care settings, often framed as responses to demographic change, labor shortages, and efficiency pressures. Current research approaches range from co-design and co-creation to broader forms of participatory engagement with future users. Yet the closer such systems move into real-world care environments, the more situations emerge in which divergent understandings of care, learning, and professional identity become visible between the different professional roles involved.

Based on qualitative interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic field work within an interdisciplinary research project in which a robotic system is co-designed by engineers and care practitioners, this paper analyzes how both groups conceptualize care and negotiate their respective roles as they collectively make sense of the system in practice.

For engineers, the care home primarily serves as a site for identifying and validating tasks, while learning occurs in the laboratory through modeling and testing. For nurses, by contrast, embedding the robotic system in daily work routines is a precondition for understanding its relevance and limits. While engineers tend to approach care as a set of formalizable tasks, nursing professionals enact it as a situated and relational practice. The contrasting understandings also shape expectations towards each other’s roles and outcomes of the project.

Drawing on Donna Haraway’s notion of “becoming with”, the paper conceptualizes the resulting tensions as productive epistemic frictions through which care practices, professional roles, and technological possibilities are mutually negotiated in interdisciplinary technology development.