Actor-Network Theory and Delivery Robots

2019

The deployment of delivery robots in the city infrastructure presents a challenge to companies, municipalities, citizens, designers, and academics concerned with the social, ethical, and policy implications of urban robotic services. The robotics literature strives to increase the delivery automation by addressing primary technical challenges such as overcoming the physical obstacles at the streets, navigating in traffic, or tracking the robot with precision. The deployment of these robots in real world, however, represented different problems, such as resistance from citizens, vandalism, and tort liability. Scholars from STS and HCI have long pointed out to the urgent gap between systematic representations of social reality embedded in the design of technologies and the messy everyday realities into which they are implemented (e.g. Dourish & Bell, 2013; Verbeek, 2012). Delivery robots include all the technical challenges plus the lived experience and near future effects of delivery automation on individual citizens and society as a whole, together with the value-charged and politicized debates around robotization, job loss, privacy, and use of public spaces for profit.

In this work, together with Assoc. Prof. Dr. Carl diSalvo from Georgia Institute of Technology, we used Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an analytical framework to highlight the complex social and ethical issues associated with the deployment of delivery robots in cities. ANT is a descriptive, constructivist approach that traces the social and technical relations involved in the development and implementation of new technologies (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987). It offers a vocabulary for interpretation of the implementation of new technologies. We used this vocabulary to ask some critical questions to the delivery-robot-network, and thereby identifying some key (current and near future) challenges resulting from the interplay of various actors in it.

The resulting work can be used as an approach that proposes a shift from a user-object interaction framework to the notion of increasingly interdependent entanglements between human-non human actors. Our overarching goal is to inspire designers to critically reflect on the consequences and possibilities bound to the growing landscape of intelligence populating our cities and imagine alternative perspectives that can leverage the full potential of the networks they are part of.   

Related Publications:

Cila, N. & DiSalvo, C. (in press). What can Actor-Network Theory teach us about the socio-technological implications of delivery robots? In M. C. Rozendaal, B. Marenko & W. Odom (Eds.), Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life: Intelligence, Agency, Ecology. Bloomsbury.