Scott Stropkay will frame the issues that designers and organizations will face as their worlds become populated with robotic systems. We will focus specifically on robots in healthcare environments to illustrate the way technology is enabling superhuman capabilities and how those capabilities raise important issues concerning product development, UX design and system design, as well as fundamental moral and ethical questions.
Robots have been tools that perform simple tasks but new technologies are making sophisticated interactions possible (e.g. Intuitive Surgical's daVinci and iRobot's RPVita). On a social level, robots are poised to become invaluable companions to us (e.g. experiments at MIT and Children’s Hospital) and even more provocatively, as smart prostheses address the needs people with disabilities, we are becoming partly robotic (e.g cochlear implants, Deka arm).
In that context, we will discuss ways designers and R&D managers need to think about change; from the perspective of capabilities and affordances, balancing the implications of privacy and community, rethinking human/machine relationships, to changes in business and institutional behavior.
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