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DOI

10.25779/12t4-cp91

Abstract

This paper brings critical design and design criticism to critical robot studies. Critical design can be described as an umbrella term for approaches making use of speculative designs to highlight and challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions or even taken-for-granted truths about the role products play (in a wide sense) in everyday life. Design criticism refers to a reasoned procedure that investigates emancipatory and/or limiting potentials of designs, theorizes the roles of affordances, materials and embodied perception as epistemological resources in media interaction, and clarifies connections between specific design choices and their associated experiential qualities, seductive powers, ideological underpinnings, material operations, and historical connections. Through an analysis of three cases of critical robots, the paper examines overlaps, oscillations, disruptions, and similarities between art and design, imagination and reality, and problems and solutions. The paper concludes by proposing three analytical additional design dimensions that relate particularly to critical robots and their potential implications for human-robot interaction and human-machine communication. In summary, the paper demonstrates (a) how an informed critique of specific cases of critical robots in themselves can help us unfold new layers of critical commentary, which in turn can inform design, (b) how the method for critiquing (critical) robots can be developed further, providing a more robust way of reading, evaluating, and drawing design implications. It also proposes that criticality, as performed by robots, could take on a more mischievous character, aiding other actants in their critical being and becoming.

ORCiD

0000-0003-2053-0933

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