Creating Sustainable Life Worlds with Robots

Robots are rapidly changing how we live and think about our future everyday lives. However, questions of sustainability rarely engage with the kinds of worlds successful robots enable and help to bring about. The potential to imagine more sustainable worlds for people, robots and other non-humans to inhabit is vast and largely untapped. In this talk I will demonstrate how the dominate ways we think about environmental sustainability and social inclusion in robotics is limiting the potential for more sustainable outcomes by narrowing the focus on inputs, outputs and causal relationships. I will showcase several projects informed by sociological and anthropologic research with Australian households and international colleagues that open up new possibilities for more sustainable everyday life. Focusing on the smart home and domestic robots-such as robotic vacuum cleaners and digital voice assistants-I will demonstrate how intentions for resource efficiency and sustainability are commonly subsumed by more resource intensive lifestyle visions that may lead to perverse outcomes. Drawing on these projects and their design ethnography methodologies, I will provide examples of other ways of researching and thinking with the future lifestyle visions associated with smart homes and robots to help realize alternative and more sustainable life worlds. These include exploring new aesthetic imaginaries for the environments where robots are intended to become (or already are) ubiquitous; paying attention to the practices in which robots are likely to become embedded; and designing research methods which enable current or potential household users to imagine alternative future relationships with robots.