SESSION 6 | Wednesday, August 21, 15:30 - 16:35 | Auditorium 2 (1441-112)
Working as a professor at the Centre of Health and Technology, I find inspiration in symbolic interactionism and science and technology studies (STS). I have been a visiting professor at School of Information, University of California Berkeley; at Chiba University, Tokyo; at Department for Anthropology, Amsterdam University (UvA), and at Department for Sociology, Lancaster University.
This paper explores the transformation of care involving robots. We discuss the use of eating robots in care homes. Drawing on the concept of assemblage, we emphasize the specificities of the journey of robots into the world of care. This means observing how robots participate in care, interact with various actors, and impact their lives. We will do this by first outlining the assemblage enacting autonomy and showing that care robots have different effects in different places. Second, we investigate the care and footwork it takes to sustain autonomy, sketching what we call the assemblage of dependency. We propose that assemblages of autonomy and assemblages of dependency are not necessarily in opposition to one another. Rather, we are referring to different normative receptions in care homes.
Chunfang Zhou is an Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark (SDU). At SDU, she is a leadership member of Center for Research in Science Education and Communication and a member in Center of AI Science and Application and Center for AI Ethics. She gained bachelor degree in Industry Automation and Information Engineering, master degree in Philosophy of Science and Technology, and PhD degree in STEM Education. Her research locates in STS studies focusing on creativity and its relations to STEM education, human-AI interaction, responsible innovation, and social robot development, etc. She has authored and co-authored over 120 peer-review publications.
Emanuela Marchetti is Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark (SDU), working in interdisciplinary research concerned with design of interactive media and technologies across the faculties of humanities and sciences. She has a mixed background in archaeology from the University of Torino (Italy) and IT-product design from SDU, her PhD focused on the digitalization of museums with the design of an interactive installation to enrich the experience of guided tours for children. She has worked with different technologies mostly aimed at the digitization of the public sector through different forms of participatory design methodologies, including care robots for care homes with a focus on combining functional and social factors.
This paper addresses how the method of participatory design can foster a practice of designing social robots with creativity and care. We focus on two research questions: a) How can we integrate creativity and care into the practice of conducting PD interventions and developing social robots? And b) how can we prepare future robot designers and AI-related professionals in university education? This paper bridges studies on creativity, care, participatory design, human-robot interaction, and AI education. A case study on designing Sanne, an automatic floor washer in a Danish nursing home, will be discussed to reflect on potential strategies for improving social robot design and implications for AI education in the future.