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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Human-Robot Interaction
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2024.1347367
This article is part of the Research Topic Towards HRI of Everyday Life View all 9 articles

From Care Practices to Speculative Vignettes -Design Considerations for Robots in Good Care

Provisionally accepted
Ralf Vetter Ralf Vetter 1*Anna Dobrosovestnova Anna Dobrosovestnova 2Helena A. Frijns Helena A. Frijns 3Laura Vogel Laura Vogel 3Katharina Brunnmayr Katharina Brunnmayr 2Christopher Frauenberger Christopher Frauenberger 1
  • 1 Department for Artificial Intelligence and Human Interfaces, Human-Computer Interaction Division, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
  • 2 Institute of Visual Computing and Human-Centered Technology, Faculty of Informatics, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Vienna, Austria
  • 3 Institute of Management Science, Faculty of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Vienna, Austria

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The care sector has become one of the test beds for developing robotic technologies, which have been promised to mitigate problems with aging populations and labor shortages. Despite these promises, the practical application of such technologies have been met with limited success.Apart from technical limitations, other challenges exist in the way we approach designing these technologies. Critical to the development in the care sector is understanding the complexity of the contexts, the needs and goals of diverse actors, and how these are socio-materially scaffolded. This paper presents a study conducted at the intersection of a value sensitive design and speculative design to understand these sensitivities. Based on the data collected in interviews (n = 6) and card workshops (n = 6) from care workers and residents in mobile care and care home contexts in Austria, we developed five themes capturing situated practices and understandings of good care as built on trust-developing routines, negotiations between different actors, affective and reciprocal dimension of care, care worker self-care, and material mediations. Subsequently, we created six speculative vignettes which serve as rhetorical devices to emphasize the tensions that arise with any technological intervention entering and reshaping existing care practices and relations. We argue that our approach can support robot designers to develop a rich understanding of the values and tensions in the specific context under study from the before design and development begin.

    Keywords: Good care, robots, Field studies, care-centered value sensitive design, Reflexive thematic analysis, vignettes, Speculative design, Design considerations

    Received: 30 Nov 2023; Accepted: 27 Jun 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Vetter, Dobrosovestnova, Frijns, Vogel, Brunnmayr and Frauenberger. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ralf Vetter, Department for Artificial Intelligence and Human Interfaces, Human-Computer Interaction Division, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, 5020, Salzburg, Austria

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.