Hannah Pelikan

Playing with a robot's face detection capabilities constitutes a praxeological approach to learning about new technology. We explore how family members discover suitable formations for a Cozmo robot to scan a single face, drawing on video recordings from Swedish homes. Taking an ethnomethodology and conversation‐analysis perspective, we demonstrate how family members jointly establish a face‐to‐robot‐face formation, moving themselves and the robot camera to frame a relevant face . Other family members engage in backgrounding their own faces and foregrounding the face to be scanned. We discuss how participants' emergent troubleshooting practices reveal differences between robot perception and human situated seeing.

Methods for understanding the felt and situated experience of controlling autonomous systems are crucial for designing systems that are adjusted to the complexity of human interaction. Prior work has tended to overlook the bodily and experiential dimensions of monitoring systems at a distance, particularly in moments of losing control. We combined two approaches, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and soma design, to explore a case where a semi-autonomous system crashed when controlled by an inexperienced operator, captured in video ethnographic fieldwork. We report on our methodological approach, combining sequential video analysis of the unfolding sequence and interviews inspired by microphenomenology to unpack the operator’s experience of losing control. We contribute methodological considerations for interaction designers seeking to explore the felt experience of having and losing control of autonomous systems and discuss how insights gained through this combination of methods, rooted in phenomenology, support a designerly appreciation of safety operators’ work.

In the Human-Robot Interaction community, Wizard of Oz (WoZ) is a commonly employed method where researchers aim to study user perceptions of robot technologies regardless of technical limitations. Despite the continued usage of WoZ, questions concerning ethical tensions and effects on the wizard remain. For instance, how do wizards experience interacting through technology, given the different roles and characters to enact, and the different environments to situate themselves in. In addition, the wizard's experiences and affects on results, continues to be under-explored. The goal of this workshop is to surface ethical, practical, methodological, personal, and philosophical tensions in the WoZ method. Though a collaborative session, we seek to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to be a wizard through eliciting first-person experiences of researchers. As a result, we hope to formulate guidelines for future wizards.

As we see robots being deployed into new places in everyday life, questions arise about what 'human-robot collaboration' (HRC) might look like there. At the same time, HRC researchers are looking to CSCW for better conceptualisations of 'collaboration', and recent work has called for more CSCW-oriented studies of HRC to support this. We address this via an ethnomethodological study of encounters between pedestrians and food delivery robots on public streets. Our analysis--using video recorded fragments of what happens on the streets--demonstrates how passers-by continuously manage walking trajectories in ways that account for robot actions; specifically we articulate how people accomplish practices of following and overtaking robots, passing by and crossing paths with them. We then show that the picture of human-robot collaboration is drawn with distinct asymmetries of action and intelligibility, where humans contribute considerable work to get something that looks like 'collaboration' achieved. This raises fundamental questions for how we talk about concepts of collaboration in HRC from a CSCW perspective, and how such notions can and should be applied to activities which include robots.

If robots are to be deployed in public places, we need to understand what factors their design should consider. Informed by sociological studies of urban settings, particularly the work of William H. Whyte and the Street Life Project, we describe four characteristics of public places that affect and are affected by robot design: (1) localism-how robot design aligns with the identity, culture, and character of the place(s) they reside within; (2) environments-the physical characteristics of the environment in which public robots operate; (3) activities- consideration for the various daily, occasional, and situational activities that are tied to place(s) robots inhabit; and (4) sociability- how people collectively and individually relate to, interact with, and make sense of robots deployed in public places. Throughout, we illustrate these characteristics with examples drawn from empirical studies of public robots. We discuss how these key characteristics of public places can inform HRI design.