Life outside the laboratory of a ‘picking-talking robot’: formalizing homes but resisting standards

Dottorato in Architettura e Ambiente
Conferenza
Referente – Fabio Bacchini | DADU, Università degli Studi di Sassari
Núria Vallès-Peris | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Life outside the laboratory of a ‘picking-talking robot’: formalizing homes but resisting standards
29 gennaio 2025 dalle 11:00 alle 13:00
Complesso del Santa Chiara, Aula Lai | S4a
Codice e link Microsoft Teams: 3vm8oif – Link: https://bit.ly/41vLIO7
Introduce e coordina: Fabio Bacchini, DADU Università di Sassari
Over the last few years, the study of robots to care for older adults in their daily lives has intensified, both in hospitals and nursing homes, as well as in the home. But living at home is different from living in other more institutionalised contexts and opens up new scenarios for reflection on the ethical and political challenges of Socially Assistive Robots. Although the use of robots in the home is in a nascent phase and is mostly carried out as a pilot process, this type of experience offers us multiple elements of analysis on the ways of organising life and the social responses to aging in the contemporary world. What logic or narratives are mobilised about a good life and good aging with robots in the home? I will present a pilot experience with a robot designed to pick up objects and interact verbally with its users, carried out at homes (n=8) of older adults in Barcelona. Throughout the analysis of this experience, we see how the logic of the laboratory in which the robots have been designed, with its processes of abstraction, rationalisation, and standardisation, collide with the logic of the home, which is based on an embodied, situated experience and meaningful relationships. The alignment of the two logics through narratives, spaces, and objects is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges of developing robots to be used at home (if the aim of developing such artifacts is to contribute to a ‘good life’).
Núria Vallès-Peris is a tenured scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and a researcher at the Barcelona Science and Technology Studies Group of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). With a degree in sociology and a PhD from the UAB, her research integrates the approach of science and technology studies and the philosophy of technology.
Núria studies the political, ethical and social controversies surrounding artificial intelligence and robotics, mainly in the field of health and care. She is particularly interested in the study of technoscience and democracy, connecting the study of imaginaries with research on infrastructures. She specialises in qualitative research, as well as in the development of participatory methods of technological design.