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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/111592 |
| Date | 22 August 2022 |
| Creators | Lo, Kuan-Hung |
| Contributors | Science and Technology Studies, Halfon, Saul E., Olson, Philip R., Labuski, Christine, Heflin, Ashley Shew, Vinsel, Lee |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/msword, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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