Title: How to do Robotics with Words: Language and Prospective Ethics in Design Anthropological Approaches to Emergent Hardware
Abstract: “Never say hardware! Ever!” “It´s not a robot dog. It´s a quadruped.” “Pilot is too masculine and military. Just call it an operator.” What kind of language is being employed in speaking about hardware robots, and what kind of language should be used as a way of design anthropological intervention in emergent robotics worlds is at the heart of this chapter. Although the literature on design anthropology has proliferated in recent years and is characterized by a vibrant variety of lenses brought to bear on questions of design, the role of language remains somewhat peripheral in such conversations. And yet, as John Austin´s paradigmatic work teaches us, words have the power to construct and enact reality in ways which have palpably material consequences. To speak about phenomena is to design these phenomena in a certain way, and to imprint on them meaning which will reverberate in prospective ways in the future trajectories of these phenomena. How do these dynamics play out in a design anthropological scenario concerned with how we make sense of robots, build concepts and relationships with them, and help create a lexicon around them? These questions are of theoretical import to anthropology, but also especially practical import in a more applied vein when both business and design anthropologists are brought in to consult and collaborate on creating experiences, products, and brands for robotics companies and projects.
The world of hardware robotics is an area of engineering which remains underexplored in design anthropological lens. The acceleration of activity and development of a variety of robot-enabling technology, such as deep neural networks, 3D printing and sensor development, has been resulting in recent decades in the creation of a lot more robots in all shapes and forms, for many purposes and with many abilities. They have the potential to redefine and transform humans and societies. Yet as robotics technology advances, how can the collective imagination make sense of it and shape its future features through the lexicon it develops around it?
This largely programmatic chapter examines how language use interfaces with design anthropological practice in the context of developing emergent robotics products. I draw together in conversation several branches of anthropological literature – on language, materiality, ethics, and design – and triangulate between them to explore the role of language in co-creating a prospective ethics for emergent technologies in a design anthropological perspective.
