Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the frictions that emerge as ‘rebellious robots’ participate in everyday sites of care. It generates new design anthropological insights and pathways towards understanding socio-material temporalities of care when designing for automated futures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the frictions that emerge as ‘rebellious robots’ participate in everyday sites of care. It generates new design anthropological insights and pathways towards understanding socio-material temporalities of care when designing for automated futures. We illustrate how futures unfold with everyday design adaptations, to reveal the creative and practical potential beyond their sleek innovation expectations. Conceptually we explore how learning about futures retrospectively through existing future ‘prototypes’ we already live with reveals pathways to better understanding potential future technological tensions. Our contribution to the ‘interdisciplinary futures’ invitation of this panel situates and engages with: troubleshooting in AI and Computer Systems; brokenness and repair in STS, design and anthropology; robotic studies in cultural geography; and feminist digital sociology. In developing this we draw from two design ethnographic studies of first-time robotic interactions in rural and regional healthcare contexts in Australia. At a Hospital in Victoria (2018), with Robotic Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) supporting domestic services of food, linen, and waste; where we trace the routines of trolley #11, identified by research participants as bringing continual frictions and disruptions. At 15 homes in New South Wales (2020) where participants aged 75+ trialled Roomba vacuum cleaners; where we unpack the process of participants becoming familiar with the vacuuming routines, abrupt schedules and Roomba’s unusual paths of movement. These accounts of daily tensions give us a generative entrance to examine broader conceptual and techno-political tensions at the intersection of futures, care ethics and technological innovation paradigms.