Designing companions, designing tools : social robots, developers, and the elderly in Japan
This master’s thesis traces a genealogy of a social robot through its conception to its various uses and the ways users interact with it. Drawing on six months of fieldwork in a start-up and two nursing homes in Japan, I first investigate the genesis of a social robot created by SoftBank, a Japanese multinational telecommunications company. This social robot is quite humanlike, made to be cute and have an adorable personality. While developers constitute one of the user populations, this robot, along with several others, is also used by elderly residents in nursing homes. By analyzing the uses of these populations, I underline the tension between the social robot as a companion and a tool. Drawing on ontological anthropology and phenomenology I look at how the robot is constructed as an entity that can be interacted with, through its conception as an ontologically ambiguous, social actor, that can express affect. Looking at multimodal interaction, and especially touch, I then classify three functions they fulfill: discovery, control, and the expression of affect, before questioning whether this acting towards the robot that does not imply acting from the robot, can be considered a form of interaction. I argue that interaction is the exchange of meaning between embodied, engaged participants. Meaning can be exchanged between robots and humans and the robot can be seen as embodied, but only the appearance of intersubjectivity is enough, rather than its actual presence.
Social robot Interaction Touch Companion Communication robot Tool Phenomenology Ontology Interaction Robot de communication