In the not-too-distant future, old people living alone have books read to them, and will be offered a shoulder to cry on by a care robot. Robots have a growing role in professional work (Butková, 2021). To minimize negative impact, WHO (2019) establishes it is essential to ensure ethical scrutiny and good governance during robot implementation. Designers and decision makers tend to view automatization as transformative to the field, however, many robots are rarely used and their use as part of complex and intricate professional settings causes concern. In general, the discussions on robots often revolve around the mismatch between technological opportunities and ethical threats. The Nova Co-Bot project explores how the introduction of digital technologies in older persons’ lives reconfigures the basis of care provision and therefore ideas about good care. In this workshop we discuss robots in care, education, and retail. 

Program: 

9.00 – 9.30
Benjamin “Care With Robots: Human-Machine Interfacing as Care Work” 

9.30 – 10.00
Mads “Being friends with avatars: Exploring the social lives of absentee children, using telepresence robots” 

10.00 – 10.30
Discussion/short break  

10.30 – 11.00
Karolina Zawieska “Social robots and everyday life” 

11.00 – 11.30
Niels Christian “Holding things together that does not easily hold together.” 
11.30 – 12.00 Discussion and ending 

Speakers: 

Benjamin Lipp was recently appointed Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Denmark. His research inves􀀁gates how digital technology interfaces with peoples’ lives and bodies, especially in the domain of healthcare. In his PhD, he offered a comprehensive study of robotic care in Europe analyzing the manifold ways in which care and robotics become interconnected in EU innovation policy, research, and innovation practices. Among his main findings is that care with robots requires extensive interfacing work. To care with machines, we need to care for machines, too. Benjamin will present a recap of his work and the current state of scholarship drawing on an ongoing writing project for the De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health & Society. 

Mads Lund Andersen is a graduate student at Aarhus University. He will join us online. Mads presents his newly started Ph.D. project on the use of telepresence avatars in Danish schools. He explores how such technologies interact with the everyday lives of absentee children, their classmates and teachers, and what effects the usage has on the social and educational processes. Mads will present preliminary findings and challenges from the project as well as from former projects with a similar scope and focus. 

Karolina Zawieska has recently completed her Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellowship with AU School of Culture and Society (CAS) and continues her collaboration with CAS as a researcher. In the field of social robotics and HRI, there has been a widespread assumption that social robots are increasingly populating or soon will become part of our everyday lives. While such an assumption points to important trends in the current work and discourse on robotics technologies, the notion of ‘everyday life’ is often taken for granted and poorly conceptualized. Karolina will present an overview of the main perspectives on the everyday that have been developed in SSH and HRI. She will explore the potential to successfully combine the two.

Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen is a professor of health and technology at University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). He is a project leader of the Project: Configuring Care with Robots (Co-Bot). We often learn about care with robots from the perspective of the care providers, technology developers, and policy makers. We know litle about how care robots fit into the care receivers’ daily lives. How do care receivers care and what do they do to hold things together when they are exposed to shifting care regimes? This talk circles around the footwork care receivers do to get the care they aim for and how their aims reconfigure when provided with robots.