On The Feminist Design of Social Robots and Designing Robots For Young People, With Young People

September 2020 – May 2022

Objective
This project has two parts – the feminist design part is about reflecting on how feminist ideas can influence social robot design, firstly ensuring that robots do not propagate harmful norms, e.g. about women, but then actually going beyond that to see if we can actively challenge such norms with the design decisions we make. The part on working with children is about exploring how children can be invited to co-design robots designed for their use, and particularly whether we can use human-in-the-loop automation approaches to have them ‘teach’ robots how to support them best.

Background
Involvement in robotics research and development is typically limited to a privileged few who generally lack diversity with regards to, e.g. gender, cultural background, etc., yet are expected to develop systems that work for all. These projects are both fundamentally concerned with trying to bring different perspectives into robotics, motivated by a desire to avoid some of the harms we already see in technology development (biased systems, inappropriate use of gender cues) but also build better systems from the beginning – who better craft robot behaviours than those who are ultimately supposed to benefit from that robot’s deployment?

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Katie Winkle. After originally studying to be a mechanical engineer, Katie undertook a PhD in social robotics at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK. She also undertook work on responsible robotics with partners from the University of Oxford. She defended her thesis ‘Expert-Informed Design and Automation of Persuasive, Socially Assistive Robots’ in Summer 2020. Now, Katie is a Digital Futures Postdoctoral Research Fellow at KTH, based in the Social Robotics group at the Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning. Her research is hugely interdisciplinary, drawing on psychology and the social sciences and the latest in robotics and AI to engineer effective, meaningful, impactful human-robot interactions.

Main supervisor
Iolanda Leite, Associate professor, Department of Robotics, Perception and Learning, KTH

Co-supervisor
Donald McMillan, Associate professor, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University