Project update | February 2022 | Imagining Robotic Care: Identifying conflict and confluence in stakeholder imaginaries of autonomous care systems

If I ask you to imagine a robot providing care, what does this look like to you?

What is the robot doing?

Is the robot working alone, or with a human carer?

Can it communicate with you?

Is this a positive scenario? Or something you find frightening?

 

Take a second to picture this. No answer or imagination is wrong, this is your scenario. What does it look like to you?

 

These are the types of questions we are asking our participants, to help them form and share their imaginaries of robots providing care. We are interested in what the general public and different stakeholders across the care ecosystem imagine robots in care to look like. We want to know in what environment or circumstances people see and don’t see robots contributing to care, and whether people even want robots providing care at all.

 

Technological innovation is gradually becoming the default response to the UK’s growing social care needs. This includes the development of robotic systems and devices to aid the delivery of care. However, there is little research into how this looks from different stakeholder perspectives. We believe that expectations, desires and fears around robotics and social care need to be understood and applied to these technological advancements. And by investigating the conflicts and confluences between stakeholder imaginaries we can contribute to responsible innovation.

 

It is difficult to fully understand these complex imaginaries by simply asking people their opinions on the topic. How people envision care robots to work, and the values associated with these imaginations are difficult to express. Therefore, we have employed an exciting hands-on methodology called LEGO serious play.

 

LEGO serious play is a fun and stimulating method of collecting data. Participants are provided with a specialised LEGO kit to use as a medium for organising and representing their thoughts. During the workshops participants are given various challenges framed as questions, much like the one asked at the start. Participants are then asked to form a response by using the LEGO as a metaphor for their story. Each round the participants take their turn to share their LEGO build and describe the scenario it represents. This leads into focus group style discussion where participants explore the values and meanings within their stories.

 

We have now run our LEGO serious play workshops with a range of stakeholders and, as expected, everyone has their own unique imagination of robots delivering care, shaped by their own experiences and expertise. Despite this, we have found some key similarities and differences in the data. Generally, people imagine a single robot with multiple functions. There have been subtle differences between whom people perceive these robots to be delivering care too and the capacity at which other humans are involved in these scenarios. The workshops have also sparked some interesting debates about whether a robot can provide companionship, and if people perceive a robot providing personal care to be more or less dignified than a human giving care.

 

 

As our project comes to an end we are bringing together these imaginaries to provide a better understanding of what people want and don’t want from care robots, and how using robots to deliver care could look on a systematic level. We hope that this project will encourage similar research to help embed these voices and lived experiences into future care robotic design.