Understanding Contextual Framing: A Nonessentialist Perspective on Social Interactions with Technological Artifacts

Social robots and other technologies designed to engage in social interactions with their users increasingly enter our everyday environments. Dealing with conceptual and practical challenges, related to these developments, requires an understanding of these technologies as new types of social actors. However, despite the substantial research effort in HRI and related fields, many basic questions about the meaning of “social actors” in the case of technological artifacts largely remain open. In this paper, we argue that a potential way to address the questions is avoiding essentialist assumptions about the nature of technological artifacts as social actors. Instead, we propose focusing on contextual framing of artifacts, that is, on how people perceive the artifacts as embedded in meaningful social contexts. In line with this proposition, we call for the development of conceptual and methodological tools that allow researchers to systematically address contextual framing. To illustrate potential directions for this development, we propose tentative versions of two analytical tools: (1) a conceptual model of robot-mediated collaboration, and (2) a set of analytical dimensions specifically focusing on contextual framing of technological agents.