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Studying Social Robots in Practiced Places
Abstract
What is the strength of anthropological fieldwork when we want to understand human technologies? In this article we argue that anthropological fieldwork can be understood as a process of gaining insight into different contextualisations in practiced places that will open up new understandings of technologies in use, e.g., technologies as multistable ontologies. The argument builds on an empirical study of robots at a Danish rehabilitation centre. Ethnographic methods combined with anthropological learning processes open up new way for exploring how robots enter into professional practices and change values, social relations and materialities. Though substantial funding has been invested in developing health service robots, few studies have been undertaken that explore human-robot interactions as they play out in everyday practice. We argue that the complex learning processes involve not only so-called end-users but also staff, management, doings and discourse in a complex amalgamation of materials and values.
What is the strength of anthropological fieldwork when we want to understand human technologies? In this article we argue that anthropological fieldwork can be understood as a process of gaining insight into different contextualisations in practiced places that will open up new understandings of technologies in use, e.g., technologies as multistable ontologies. The argument builds on an empirical study of robots at a Danish rehabilitation centre. Ethnographic methods combined with anthropological learning processes open up new way for exploring how robots enter into professional practices and change values, social relations and materialities. Though substantial funding has been invested in developing health service robots, few studies have been undertaken that explore human-robot interactions as they play out in everyday practice. We argue that the complex learning processes involve not only so-called end-users but also staff, management, doings and discourse in a complex amalgamation of materials and values.
23 pages, Unknown Binding
Published April 1, 2015
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March 1, 2016
I have a great deal of respect for the Scandinavian school of software design. They have pioneered techniques that study the political and social context of software and forcefully insist that each and every time the systems analyst embarks upon a new analysis and design, he or she will be sorely taxed to, at best, mediate between the different shareholder values and agendas.
I am thus somewhat bemused to come across this paper which seems to point to a very unscandinavian like floundering. Perhaps times have changed, perhaps the different researchers, shareholders and the (techno)anthropologists who come together in this study are somehow blithely unaware of all that hard-earned knowledge focusing on information and decision systems which has been lying around for some twenty years at least.
As far as I can tell from reading the paper, a bunch of health service politicians and managers decided it would be a cool thing to buy some "social" robots and test them out to, to, er, well to do something in a state of the art Danish rehabilitation centre "...specializing in physical rehabilitation for people who have experienced disabling physical illnesses, strokes or accidents". They finally decide to use the robots to, er, see if they can get patients -excuse me, guests or is it citizens?- who are "small eaters" to eat more -well actually no, they can´t do that, so finally they test the robots as dinner hosts -sort of- but never seem to actually pin down what the hosts are being testing for.
As a citizen of a country with one of the worst public health systems in the world, not only does the experience seem pointless but it seems insulting to me to have so much money and effort poured into such a badly designed experience -a robot host which uses "Wizard of Oz" techniques (so, the robot is nothing but a mouthpiece for a remote human operator?) who appears to have nothing more to do than listen to six patients cum citizens cum guests having dinner and presumably give some kind of interactive nods and conversational prompts. The unsurprising conclusion is that people like being listened to, a conclusion pointed out by experiments in British hospitals in the late 1960s in which patients preferred typing into boxes to talking with hospital doctors -and apparently found the boxes more sympathetic to boot- , not to mention Weizenbaum´s observations on some naive perceptions and uses of Eliza (1966), the first chatterbot, which supposedly modeled the non-directive tactics of rogerian therapists.
There is a great deal of interesting theoretical material in this paper, which is why I give the paper two stars, but also a great deal to read between the lines -it somehow strikes me as a last ditch attempt to salvage an article out of an almost complete botch up and thus justify time and public money wasted, er, spent.
I am thus somewhat bemused to come across this paper which seems to point to a very unscandinavian like floundering. Perhaps times have changed, perhaps the different researchers, shareholders and the (techno)anthropologists who come together in this study are somehow blithely unaware of all that hard-earned knowledge focusing on information and decision systems which has been lying around for some twenty years at least.
As far as I can tell from reading the paper, a bunch of health service politicians and managers decided it would be a cool thing to buy some "social" robots and test them out to, to, er, well to do something in a state of the art Danish rehabilitation centre "...specializing in physical rehabilitation for people who have experienced disabling physical illnesses, strokes or accidents". They finally decide to use the robots to, er, see if they can get patients -excuse me, guests or is it citizens?- who are "small eaters" to eat more -well actually no, they can´t do that, so finally they test the robots as dinner hosts -sort of- but never seem to actually pin down what the hosts are being testing for.
As a citizen of a country with one of the worst public health systems in the world, not only does the experience seem pointless but it seems insulting to me to have so much money and effort poured into such a badly designed experience -a robot host which uses "Wizard of Oz" techniques (so, the robot is nothing but a mouthpiece for a remote human operator?) who appears to have nothing more to do than listen to six patients cum citizens cum guests having dinner and presumably give some kind of interactive nods and conversational prompts. The unsurprising conclusion is that people like being listened to, a conclusion pointed out by experiments in British hospitals in the late 1960s in which patients preferred typing into boxes to talking with hospital doctors -and apparently found the boxes more sympathetic to boot- , not to mention Weizenbaum´s observations on some naive perceptions and uses of Eliza (1966), the first chatterbot, which supposedly modeled the non-directive tactics of rogerian therapists.
There is a great deal of interesting theoretical material in this paper, which is why I give the paper two stars, but also a great deal to read between the lines -it somehow strikes me as a last ditch attempt to salvage an article out of an almost complete botch up and thus justify time and public money wasted, er, spent.
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