Exploring the role of robots: Participatory performances to ground and inspire innovation

In performing collaborative scenarios of potential ideas, relationships from the future are brought into play as both objects for critique and enhancement. We see that a design anthropology that supports, facilitates, and provokes through these types of participatory activities as an essential shift from anthropology “of” towards an anthropology “with” people as part of design processes, and as part of this transition relies on setting up a space for reflection of goals and interests within the project rather than instigating critique only from the researchers. In this paper, we introduce a welfare technology project and our early attempts at performing relations in the context of robotics and automation, assumed to be an integral part of sterilization work for medical instruments. We focus on several aspects of the project: relations between work within and outside of the project, the translation of performances towards deliverables, and the role of the researcher in such activities.