My name is Judith and I will present the work of Ronda, Marc and me about the intricacies
of social robots in complex social settings.
For most roboticists it‘s common sense: a sociable robot is socially in a human-like
way, and interacting with it is like interacting with another person. Robots just stand in
for humans or other living beings (for example a pet, a nurse, a companion). This way of
thinking tends to underplay the intricacies of interacting with robots in social settings.
What is missing is an idea of the social environment, the practices that evolve, and a reflection
on how practices may differ when the social partner is a machine rather than a living
being.
Thus, in our study we explore meaningful applications for social robots. What kind of new roles
would robots take on in complex social scenarios? Second we ask, how robots designed for social
scenarios would change the scenarios and associated practices in the long run? What are the social
and ethical implications? Finally, we ask how to design for positive
experiences with social robots. What are suggestions for robot design?
Our approach is inspired by post-athropocentric entanglement theories in HCI. Here, sociality
is considered neither to be situated in the machine nor in the human, but in their relation.
Thus, gaining knowledge about a particular artefact means tracing its relations with
others. Further our approach is related to speculative methods in design.
Basis of our approach are so-called fictional documentaries.
Fictional documentaries are video reports from the future – in our case created by
HCI-master‘s students about different fictional social robots – without ever showing the
robot itself. The students were asked to create meaningful concepts of robots. Instead
of designing the robot, they elaborated on potential everyday scenarios and determined
the people and things affected by the robot. They asked fellow students, grandparents,
or friends to slip into the roles of stakeholders – such as the CEO of a robot company or
a passenger in a train – and to comment on imaginary experiences they made with the
robot. The actors were free to improvise.
Let’s have a look at an excerpt. This fictitious couple imagined living with a conflict mediating
robot.
"It is quite strange when the robot suddenly shouts something from behind while we are
discussing or suddenly starts to imitate one of our voices. Sometimes we even ask ourselves
– Hä? What did you say there? or something, because we are a bit confused when he is imitating
our voices so well."
"We also often ask ourselves: Did you say that or the robot? After a while we improved
so greatly in our debate culture, so that we said things that usually only the robot
was saying. But it was really the other person."
All in all, eight fictional documentaries about eight robots evolved, for example about
poly, a robot that teaches cultural knowledge to people with migration background. We applied
a thematic analysis to the eight videos –
what revealed four categories of application scenarios.
In the first two categories robots featured a dyadic interaction, with the robot as a
substitute for a human partner. They focused on primarily practical tasks with social outcome
(for example organizing appointments) or – in the second category – addressed the social
explicitly (for example watching movies with people).
Robots of the third and fourth category went beyond the dyadic and mediated couples or
groups of people in a human-human-robot interaction. They supported with avoiding or resolving
conflict and were intended either for public or private domestic settings.
Further, our secondary analysis revealed 19 experiences, such as feeling related to others
through the robot.
We condensed them into seven themes, such as "relatedness".
We cross-tabulated themes with the two perspectives, dyadic substitution, and group mediation,
because similar themes played out quite differently depending on these perspectives.
We found that the scenarios of our first category (dyadic interaction with practical task) are
most similar to already existing application scenarios. Although, of course, they have
social implications, similarly to robotic vacuum cleaners here robots rather remain
tools. In scenarios of the dyadic substitution perspective (first and second category), social
robots replace other humans. From our perspective, these scenarios – while obvious – are
questionable. Either the technology will not be human-like enough (for example: a robotic
nurse will lack emotional warmth), or it will be, raising difficult ethical questions (for
example: is artifcial emotional warmth acceptable at all). In scenarios of our third and fourth
category – the mediation perspective – the very same robot adapted very different roles
(for example a mediator, a therapist or a black sheep). The roles seem less predetermined
by design, but rather emerge from the social dynamics of the group. These scenarios seem
less explored so far. From our perspective they are most interesting for future development.
Most of the challenges reported, depend on the idea that robots are similar to humans
and compete with them. For example the anxiety of being replaced by a robot or of being deceived
by a humanoid robot. Only in a few cases, interviewees felt povoked by the super-human
qualities of robots. For example a robot is perceived as superior since it approaches
disputes in an unbiased manner.
At the heart of the robotic benefits are imagined skills, humans value but find impossible to
realize, for example “always being present”, or “never forgetting anything“. In mediation
scenarios interviewees mentioned abilities such as “being objective” or “concentrating
on facts instead of feelings”. For example, fictional passengers on trains reported feeling
less personally attacked by the robot than by other people when criticized. It seemed
crucial for the robot not to be overly understanding or polite. “Being social” obviously means
something different when dealing with robots. All in all, the benefits evolve not because the
robots are one-to-one substitutes of living beings, but because typical machine attributes
distinguish them from humans.
Unlike most HRI methods, our method puts the focus on the social dynamics that arise, instead
of on the robot itself. We were able to gather multiple and conflicting viewpoints. Obviously,
we just learn how present people imagine to feel about the possibilities of future robots.
However, the insights can be used to shape future forms of this technology. The documentaries
are the result of a critical co-creation. Since participants never got to see a picture
of the robot, there was ample room for imagination. And participants became emotionally involved
while performing. The setting, for example in front of a bus stop, made them think of
real experiences they had before. This blurred the boundaries between the actual (that is:
their present everyday life, their own identity) and the possible (that is: a future world,
possible identity). Of course, the approach has limitations. It depends a lot on the
imagination, the talent for roleplay and the prior knowledge of the participants. Some
participants just reproduced already existing well-known critiques of robotics instead of
actually putting themselves into the suggested scenario. All in all, our approach is speculative
and speculative methods focus on finding problems rather than solving them. We are aware that
fictional documentations hypothesize and do not confirm challenges and opportunities for
social robots.
In sum, we identified 3 suggestions for social robot design: First of all, we saw that social
situations of robots are made up by complex dynamics between diverse stakeholders. Thus,
we believe designers need to grasp the social complexity first, before designing technologies
for it. Further, we realized: not a smiling face with cute eyes is turning a robot into
a social one, but the social impact the robot unfolds. The “social” is not located in
the robot itself, but in its relationships. Thus, be aware of the diverse social powers
that a robot develops in relation with others. And finally, we saw two paradigms when designing
robots: Substituting social powers of pre-existing social beings (that is: human social powers)
for example being compassionate, or applying social powers of machine beings, for example
being objective. Our fictional documentaries demonstrate, that robots mimicking humans
are afflicted with anxieties. We believe, understanding human and robotic powers to
be complementary could be key to shaping meaningful social relationships with robots. Thus, we
suggest to make use of the unique social powers of robots – the so called robotic superpowers.
Thank you for your attention.