3rd International Workshop
on Worker-Robot Relations
Futuring Worker Empowerment through Worldbuilding around Human-Robot Interactions

Building on two previous workshops on transdisciplinary practices for shaping worker-robot relations, this half-day workshop introduces participants to worldbuilding, a design-driven technique used to co-create and explore richly detailed futures, as a way to empower workers and scholars in reimagining plausible and preferable future worker-robot relations (WRRs). WRRs describe the interactions, collaborations, and shared practices between workers and robotic systems in organisational contexts. 

The workshop begins with an introduction to WRRs, and a keynote by a worldbuilding expert that will outline the method and its value for envisioning future WRRs. Groups of workshop participants will then investigate concrete case studies that demonstrate how robotic systems can support workers in their practice, with a focus on enhancing wellbeing. Through interactive activities in this workshop, participants will co-create imagined worlds of work, which will be analysed systemically across multiple levels of complexity, from the individual worker and their immediate context to broader societal implications. The workshop ultimately aims to build a community committed to shaping sustainable futures of robot-assisted work.

Main contact: Wilbert Tabone - w.tabone@tudelft.nl

The exact start time is still to be communicated to us by the conference organisation, but it will take place in the afternoon session.

Introduction

14:30 - 14:40 Introduction to the workshop by the organisers

Keynote

14:40 - 15:05  Lightning Keynote 

15:05 - 15:10  Discussion 

15:10 - 15:25  Coffee break with participant poster presentations

Activity with workshop participants

15:25 - 16:40 Facilitated hands-on world-building activity 

16:40 - 16:50 Coffee break 

16:50 - 17:05 Facilitated hands-on world-building activity (continued)

17:05 - 17:50 Activity participants present their projects

Wrap-Up and Next Steps

17:50 - 18:00 Wrap-up, and closing remarks by the organizers 

• Do futuring activities play into your forward-looking projects in HRI?

• Do the organisations you work with have a framework to engage with strategies for their future (e.g., McKinsey’s 3 horizons)?

• How does the organisation’s vision/strategy manifest in 

  • the companies operations (at different timescales)

  • how workers see their personal, professional, and societal futures 

• How might your research, design, and development activities with workers support HRI as a sustainable empowering societal force?

In the context of our workshop, we are especially interested in how front line workers understand their role, agency and aspirations around their personal and work futures.

 The hands-on worldbuilding activity will involve participants working in groups to develop their grounded, critical speculations about worker- robot relations. Each group will focus on one of the three case studies listed above, or any other additional case study, supported by an assigned facilitator, as they work on large sheets of paper with coloured markers. Group members will be encouraged to write out their thoughts as they scaffold within their domain across the different scale levels (i.e. S, M, L). 

• S: Situated Scenario: is the level of the work floor. It involves the immediate interactions between workers and robotic systems, situated within real-world contexts. This includes embodied experiences, gestures, and technical work done in collaboration between a worker and a robot. 

• M: Work System Infrastructures: this level focuses on the work system infrastructures, investigating how robotic systems are integrated into workflows, spaces, and professional relations. This includes embedded systems, scenarios and lived experiences as entangled across the human stakeholders (e.g. nurses, managers, facility staff, and technology developers), the workspace, and technology. 

• L: Societal Futures: is the societal level, considering the broader systemic transformations in labour that robotics may bring about. This includes a systemic vision of how the integration of robotics to support workers’ wellbeing has impacted society, and how it has transformed shared values, rituals and practices around work.

For each domain and scaffolding scale, participants will think about worker empowerment through envisioning the WRR framework (linking the workers with technology and the organisational context). At the end of the scaffolding exercise, the participants will gather all their written material into a system map, which encapsulates the knowledge of that world across the different scales.

About the Keynote Speaker

Founder and President of the OzHse Group—an action-focused think tank +/+ design lab for the Age of Entanglement—Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator whose work bridges architecture, complexity science, and technology. A Full Professor and former Director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University, she has also served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Design at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and as a Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. During fifteen years on the faculty at MIT, she helped revitalize the School’s design culture through a broadened integration of global, technological, and environmental inquiry. Her current work—building on projects from the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh to the redesign of the Pardee RAND Graduate School—explores how design and cognitive AI can together shape adaptive systems and emergent architectures of learning. Her book Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World (MIT Press) lays the groundwork for applying complexity science to design for a world of unprecedented precarity and opportunity.

Location