By investigating the social and environmental politics that are embodied in service robots, I show how both the laboratory culture and wider society expect their own respective values and environmental cultures to displace the other. This dissertation highlights the importance of understanding how robotics laboratories and larger society mutually transform each other, using a framework I call Laboratorization of Everyday Life. I analyze how the development of robotics involves a mutual transformation of the robot, the laboratory, and particular values and norms involving education, gender, class, body image, and living spaces in the society the laboratory is embedded within. Actors in laboratories are not hermetically sealed, but fully part of society. Similarly, actors in society change their everyday environments to better conform to laboratory settings, in order to make the wider world "useful" for technological innovation. People living in modern society are actually living in a semi-laboratory, which is embedded within the robot's technological default settings regarding values and environment, which are selected by the laboratory's engineers and designers. By conducting trial and error in everyday life, robot users have agency to re-mold service robots and norms built into their design and technological capacities. That is, the users are also able to rebuild and reinterpret values and environmental cultures inside their service robots. Ultimately, my dissertation offers a potential perspective on how robotics laboratories and larger society work together through robots to open lines of trustful communication between scientific, social, and political communities. / Doctor of Philosophy / Using a robot in everyday life requires many things, including lighting, sounds, noise, room temperature, knowledge, proper usage, and expectations about the robot. Since a robot is a creation of the laboratory, roboticists bake assumptions, such as environmental settings, gender bias, racism, norms, and values, into the robot. When users use the robot in their everyday life, they have to modify their everyday environments, understandings, concepts, and values to fit with the assumptions already in it. Hence, roboticists, users, and the robot transform everyday life into a semi-laboratory: a society that embodies the selected assumptions from the robotics laboratory. In order to examine this phenomenon, I propose a framework I call the "Laboratorization of Everyday Life". I analyze how the development of robotics involves a mutual transformation of the robot, the laboratory, and particular values and norms involving education, gender, class, body image, and living spaces in the society the robot is embedded within. Actors in laboratories are not hermetically sealed off, but fully part of society.  I argue that people living in modern society are actually living in a semi-laboratory, which is embedded within the robot's technological default settings regarding social values and environment, which are selected by the laboratory's engineers and designers. Although modern society is embedded within the selected values from the laboratory, people still have agency to accept, modify, rewrite, and reject the assumptions coming with the robot. By conducting trial and error in everyday life, users have agency to re-mold robots and norms built into their design and technological capacities. That is, the users are also able to rebuild and reinterpret values and environmental cultures inside their robots. This framework shows how robotics laboratories and larger society work together through robots to open lines of communication between scientific, social, and political communities.

Studiens syfte är att bidra med kunskap om vad som kommer till uttryck som viktigt i den materiella miljön i en svensk respektive sydafrikansk förskolekontext, via barns fotografier. I studien deltar två förskolor, en i Sverige och en i Sydafrika. Barnen fick i uppgift att fotografera sin förskolas materiella miljö. Fotografierna kodades och analyserades sedan av oss med hjälp av begrepp från den grundade teorin. Fotografierna från de båda förskolorna kopplades till varsitt tema som ansågs övergripande för majoriteten av de tagna fotografierna. Ur bilderna från den svenska förskolan växte temat lek fram medan fotografierna från den sydafrikanska förskolan visade på en starkare koppling till undervisning. / The purpose of the study is to contribute knowledge about what is considered important in the material environment in a Swedish and South African preschool context, with the help of children's photographs. Two preschools are participating in the study, one in Sweden and one in South Africa. The children were given the task of photographing their preschool's material environment. The photographs were then coded and analysed by us using concepts from the grounded theory. The photographs from the two preschools were linked to a theme that could be considered comprehensive for the majority of the photographs taken. From the pictures from the Swedish preschool, the theme of play emerged, while the photographs from the South African preschool showed a stronger connection to teaching.