[Petit Fours #423] On friction, glitches, and shape-changing technology
Hi, everyone! This week, I’m glad to share two fresh articles, amidst other recommendations:
#1 The pre-prints for our CHI 2025 papers are up! Here’s the abstract of Friction in Processual Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethical Relations in Interdisciplinary Research, led by Rachael Garrett: “Friction – disagreement and breakdown – is an omnipresent aspect of conducting interdisciplinary research yet is rarely presented in formal research reporting. We analyse a performance-led research process where professional dancers with different disabilities explored how to improvise with an industrial robot, with the support of an interdisciplinary team of human-computer and human-robot interaction researchers. We focus on one site of friction in our research process; how to dance – safely – with robots? By presenting our research process, we exemplify the different ways in which we encountered this friction and how we reconfigured the research process around it. We contribute five ways in which we arrived at a generative ethical outcome, which may be helpful in productively engaging with friction in interdisciplinary collaboration.”
#2 In the Moment of Glitch: Engaging with Misalignments in Ethical Practice, led by Rachael Garrett & Kat Hawkins, promotes further critical ethical reflection: “Glitches – moments when technologies do not work as desired – will become increasingly common as industrially-designed robots move into complex contexts. Taking glitches to be potential sites of critical ethical reflection, we examine a glitch that occurred in the context of a collaborative research project where professional dancers with different disabilities improvised with a robotic arm. Through a first-person account, we analyse how the dancer, the robot, and the rest of the research team enacted ethics in the moment of glitch. Through this analysis, we discovered a deep and implicit ethical misalignment wherein our enactments of ethics in response to the glitch did not align with the values of the project. This prompted a critical re-engagement with our research process through which we forged a dialogue between different ethical perspectives that acted as an invitation to bring us back into ethical alignment with the project’s values.“
#3 Here’s a short interview with Anna Ståhl about shape-changing technology in car seats: Ny uppfinning: Smarta bilsäten – kan rädda liv i trafiken
#4 And for an hour of respite from all the things, here’s a lovely podcast about Tove Jansson (in Swedish), featuring Boel Westin from Stockholm University.
-A