Hello everyone, My name is EunJeong Cheon and I am from Syracuse University.
I am so excited to present the paper titled Robots as a place for socializing.
This work was done in collaboration with Eike, Kristina, and Mikael.
Jonathan Grudin, the author of a CSCW seminar paper (1988) “Why CSCW Applications Fail,”
said in the interview in 2015, “The sources of trouble I described back
then (1988) mostly arose from insufficient understanding of organizational processes
and team processes, and I thought we would quickly overcome them... we don’t understand
the nuanced activities we are hoping to support.
So we do still encounter some of the same problems in these new contexts”.
In this work, we looked at the nuanced activities and social interactions around cobots in manufacturing
companies, and how collaborative robots (cobots) may engage in
broader interactions beyond the robot-operator interaction.
Collaborative Robot, what we focused in this study, is a specialized type of industrial
robot.
Cobot is a robot for direct physical interaction with a human user, within a shared workspace.
As you see these two pictures in the slide, a cobot visually seems similar to classical
industrial robots, but cobots have the ability to share the workplace
with human workers without safety fences.
In this paper, we investigate social and organizational dynamics brought by robots at the workplace.
To understand how introducing and deploying cobots may affect broader interactions between
different levels of employees across the organization, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a danish
manufacturing company, starting in Feb 2021.
Company A is A large production company over 2000 employees.
The company started in 2009 to invest heavily in automation using industrial robots.
In this time, at the company, a collaborative cell was built in production and operators
began working with collaborative robots for the first time.
Throughout this implementation process, we visited the company two or three times a week
for three months to observe and conduct interviews.
We conducted 14 interviews with six operators, and All interviews were conducted on the shop
floor or in the cell.
We observed that the interactions of the cobots and other employees varied depending on the
spatial setup — in or outside the cobot cell.
Today I share only some of the findings.
the introduction of cobots led to a rearrangement in spatial configuration from pipeline to
circular production cell.
The new production cell was organized in four quadrants (Q1-Q4), with the two cobots implemented
in Q3 and Q4 as illustrated in this bottom Figure.
the number of human workers were reduced from four to three.
Even though the pipeline had more workers, the distribution of the workers did not allow
for easy communication.
The new circular production cell decreased the maximum distance between workers to just
a few meters, making both visual and auditory interaction significantly easier.
With the decrease in colleagues in the same cobot cell and shift, it is now more important
than ever to work with colleagues who share similar work ethics and chemistry.
Another finding I would like to highlight in this talk is about the interactions outside
the production cell.
To handle robots technical issues, the company had external technition, here called RoboBuddy,
stationed on site during its regular business hours.
While the operators are now closely working with the RoboBuddies, they have noticed a
decrease in their supervisor's engagement and hope to receive more supervisors' attention
to their work..
The operators’ relationship with their supervisors reflected the operators’ descriptions of
two workplaces — production cell and the desk office.
As you see this picture, the office space was located on the same floor and just a few
meters away from the production cell behind a glass wall with several passable junctions.
The operators used phrases like “going up” or “they come down to us” during the interviews.
The desk office space feels inaccessible to operators, demonstrating their perceived distance
from the office workers.
In this talk, I am going to briefly talk about the first two discussion sections.
Contrasting with previous studies, our findings show that robot introduction does not always
have to result in a decrease in social interaction.
the introduction of the cobots reshaped the production line to a circular pattern instead
of a long pipeline.
This brought operators closer together, resulting in better opportunities for social interaction.
In previous studies, Individual physical distance from robots or time spent around robots have
been mainly used to measure people’s engagement with robots
In this study, however, the operatiors’ social interactions with other coworkers revealed
the extent of their engagement.
Existing work on boundaries in organization studies emphasized that different professions
often used boundaries to draw distinctions between themselves and others, create status
inequalities, and cooperate with or even blindside other groups in their practices.
Researchers in organization studies highlighted that boundaries are relational.
To articulate the characteristics of boundaries, Barrett and colleagues classified three different
kinds of boundary relations – boundary cooperation, boundary neglect, and boundary strain.
In our study, we also found that Through the adoption of cobots, the operators and other
groups of employees restructured various critical boundaries.
We detailed the social interactions and dynamics that the different groups of employees created
to improve their work practices, Specifically we show how they worked out the
unevenly distributed knowledge of cobots across the companies.
As CSCW researchers, we would need to consider how to facilitate cooperation while impeding
neglect and strain imposed by the subtle influences of robots in the
workplace.
While previous work has emphasized how robots can mediate social and group dynamics by changing
people’s attitudes and behaviors in a group, our study focused on how robots became an
occasion for social interaction rather than played a direct role in the dynamics among
people.
Please check out our paper for other findings and implications!
Thanks for listening.
If you have any question or are interested in any potential future collaboration, please
feel free to email me.
Thank you.