The Historical Construction of Emotions in Robotics

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

What role do emotions play in the development of new technologies? Can consumers’ emotions be manipulated through technological design? Can technologies themselves be biased? Making Friends: The Historical Construction of Emotions in Technology engages these questions by examining the history of robotics engineering. The project shows that emotions inflected decision-making at every stage of robot production: planning, securing funding, object design, marketing, and the end uses of robots. It also reveals that the seemingly subjective and individual emotions of key players in the development of robotics technologies were shaped by long historical processes and social dynamics. These conclusions demonstrate that historical literacy is crucial for designing technologies that better address consumers’ needs, for identifying sources of technological bias, and for spotting intentional emotional manipulation embedded in technological design. The results of the study will be summarized in a crossover book for academic and non-academic readers, academic articles and newspaper op-eds, and public talks. Factual findings, data-sets, and theoretical conclusions will be used to develop undergraduate courses and to train graduate students. Project findings will also provide an evidential basis for public discussions of ethics in technology. Making Friends centers on three research questions: What roles do linguistic, material, and visual environments play in shaping emotional attitudes towards robots? What emotional needs are addressed by technology policies that encourage the development of robotics technologies? And, how do engineers’ design choices —whether conscious or unconscious—shape users’ emotional responses to robotic technologies? Combining archival research, oral history, and computational methods, the project shows how engineers brought their own life experiences and associations into the design process, how they capitalized on social dynamics to appeal to funding agencies and policy makers, and how they shaped consumers’ experience of robots by physically modifying design to eliminate or to elicit certain emotional triggers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.