We Can Do Better! An Initial Survey Highlighting an Opportunity for More HRI Work on Loneliness

Ananto, Rahatul Amin; Young, James E.

doi:10.1145/3434074.3447213

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Thus, in addition to studying human-robot interactions, one could be asking what are the big themes that HRI can shed light on that point to those aspects or elements of everyday life that need to be improved? For example, the use and presence of social robots has often been discussed in the context of a growing social isolation taking place in techno-capitalist societies (Šabanović, 2010;Ananto and Young, 2021). Another example of a critical HRI inquiry includes recent developments in the "Feminist HRI" (Winkle et al, 2021;Winkle et al, 2023a) or reflections on human adaptation (or a lack of thereof) to life with robots (Harrison and Johnson, 2023).…”

Section: The Old/new Everydaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a conceptualisation and critique of everyday life in HRI

Zawieska,

Hannibal

2023

Front. Robot. AI

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This paper focuses on the topic of “everyday life” as it is addressed in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research. It starts from the argument that while human daily life with social robots has been increasingly discussed and studied in HRI, the concept of everyday life lacks clarity or systematic analysis, and it plays only a secondary role in supporting the study of the key HRI topics. In order to help conceptualise everyday life as a research theme in HRI in its own right, we provide an overview of the Social Science and Humanities (SSH) perspectives on everyday life and lived experiences, particularly in sociology, and identify the key elements that may serve to further develop and empirically study such a concept in HRI. We propose new angles of analysis that may help better explore unique aspects of human engagement with social robots. We look at the everyday not just as a reality as we know it (i.e., the realm of the “ordinary”) but also as the future that we need to envision and strive to materialise (i.e., the transformation that will take place through the “extraordinary” that comes with social robots). Finally, we argue that HRI research would benefit not only from engaging with a systematic conceptualisation but also critique of the contemporary everyday life with social robots. This is how HRI studies could play an important role in challenging the current ways of understanding of what makes different aspects of the human world “natural” and ultimately help bringing a social change towards what we consider a “good life.”

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