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Widespread robotic technologies are just around the corner - we need new design research methodologies to find out what people want from robots and how best to include them in everyday life.
Ethnographic prototypes are a speculative and participatory design research approach that we developed as part of the Robot City workshops. These provided participants with a means to reflect, create and collectively discuss the possibilities of urban robotics.
As part of this process, augmented reality (AR) and design making enabled people to explore their ideas around future technologies, while video ethnography helped us dive into these visions through speculative storytelling. We designed a series of new robot prototypes based on peoples’ stories that represent possible future robot types for urban public spaces.
1.
Start with people and context, not technology.
Key Insights
2.
Speculation
is invaluable.
3.
Robots are more than productivity machines.
4.
Design research must be interdisciplinary.
Ethnographic prototypes can support robotics design.
The key to developing socially and culturally suitable robots is to first understand people’s everyday relationships and activities, and then consider how robots can be a part of those. People can readily imagine new types of robots without reproducing well-worn narratives about dominant or threatening machines.
Instead of starting with what is technically possible, robots designed for public spaces need to be based on the ways that people use, value and share those spaces. The meanings of technology are deeply contextual - design ethnographic methods enable this inquiry.
Robotics design research should broaden to include speculative storytelling and making. AR technology can help people unlock their imagination within a particular space. This expands robotic possibilities and reveals how people feel and what they want from robots.
Our approach to digital and material speculative making builds on how technologies are already embedded in existing spaces, relationships and ways of doing things. Storytelling helps bring this to life in possible futures.
When invited to consider robots’ effects on public spaces, people saw them as offering public value in multiple ways. They looked beyond the expected roles to robots that offered reassurance, entertainment, spiritual connection, or ones that signalled diversity and inclusivity. Through a combination of visualising, making and storytelling, our design ethnographic workshops yielded novel ideas for future robotic technologies.
These visions were not just about efficiency or purpose, but spoke to people’s social and environmental values. The complexity and diversity of public space settings meant people thought about robots in terms of the common good, not just private productivity.
Combining design, AR technology and ethnography through participatory workshops yielded valuable insights about what people want from robots that conventional disciplinary approaches cannot reach. We learned what people value about public space, and how they imagine technology as part of it. Some of the results surprised us!
We drew on research and practices from design, cultural geography and robotics to create the workshops and analyse the results. Digital design of the AR robots, collaborative hands-on making and video design ethnography combined into a unique workshop practice.
Why we did it
This project allowed us to work with versions of real robots, but to open them up to speculative possibilities in a creative and playful way.
Our previous work highlighted that robotics research tends to be focused on solving technical and operational problems - to ensure robots complete tasks efficiently and without failure. However, robots in public space face much more complicated settings than factory floors. The cultural meanings, spatial qualities, sensory affordances and political valences of public space are not only distinct but always changing.
participants
60
We refined this innovative approach across four workshops in Melbourne and Tokyo, with over 60 participants who imagined and generated multiple speculative robots.
The work supported a successful Australia Research Council application ($600k+) and multiple publications and conference presentations.
$600k+