THINGS AS CITIZENS
Both in academic literature and news, a debate is growing about the possibility of attributing to robots typically human statuses, such as citizenship, rights, and personhood. See for instance the European Parliament Resolution of Civil Law Rules of Robotics, or the attribution of citizenship to the robot Sophia in Saudi Arabia. We joined such debate with the intent of exploring how conceptualizing robots as citizens may affect the way we understand, approach, and design them.
Things as Citizens is a research project developed at TU Delft in collaboration with Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), by me, Nazli Cila, Iskander Smith, and Elisa Giaccardi.
In this picture: workshops held in 2018, across the Netherlands and Norway.
We explored the topic through two different approaches. On the one hand, we held a series of workshops focused on envisioning and questioning near future service robotics solutions. We engaged diverse stakeholders, and focused on facilitating the participation of non-experts, through a dedicated toolkit.
Designing robots as citizens framework.
On the other hand, we explored the concept of citizenship on a theoretical level and developed a framework for rethinking the way we can approach urban robot design. The key result of this exploration is a reframing of the values to address when designing urban robots. Approaching robots as citizens ask for consideration of community and social values, rather than the sole logic of efficiency and technological advancement. In this perspective, the main challenge is to build human-robot interdependencies and let people perceive the intended social value of the robots.
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Lupetti, M. L., & Cila, N. (2019). Envisioning and questioning near future urban robotics. Desform’19.
Lupetti, M. L., Bendor, R., & Giaccardi, E. (2019). Robot citizenship: A design perspective. Desform’19.