What does it mean to study people and robots through a socio-technical lens, and what does this help us see?

In this seminar, Jasper Vermeulen and Dr Amir Asadi from the Australian Cobotics Centre’s Designing Socio Technical Robotic Systems explore how people, technologies and working practices shape one another. Coming from contrasting academic backgrounds, Jasper from the social sciences and Amir from engineering, both found common ground in socio-technical approaches to understanding how robots become part of everyday work.

 Drawing on their PhD research in healthcare, they will share how this perspective shaped the questions they asked, the methods they used and what they learned about making robots work in practice. The seminar will close with a discussion of what these insights mean for designing and introducing robotic systems, and how researchers and practitioners can bring a socio-technical perspective into their own work.