Robots in Pain, Humans in Play: Soma as a Qualitative Method for Investigating Intelligent Human-Robot Configurations

Robots in Pain, Humans in Play: Soma as a Qualitative Method for Investigating Intelligent Human-Robot Configurations

This is a short abstract/position piece to support our presentation at the international conference - Designing for Bodies: Practices, Imaginaries and Discourses. University of Southern Denmark, Kolding - Feb 2024

Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the Turing AI World Leading Researcher Fellowship in Somabotics: Creatively Embodying Artificial Intelligence [grant number APP22478], AI UK: Creating an International Ecosystem for Responsible AI Research and Innovation [EP/Y009800/1] and Centre for Doctoral Training in Horizon: Creating Our Lives in Data [grant number EP/S023305/1].

Citation 
Chamberlain, A., Ngo, V., McGarry, G., Kucukyilmaz, A., Benford, S., & Higgins, A. (2025). Robots in Pain, Humans in Play: Soma as a Qualitative Method for Investigating Intelligent Human-Robot Configurations. Designing for Bodies: Practices, Imaginaries and Discourses, Kolding, Denmark. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14628930

References and some of our previous work

Steve Benford, Rachael Garrett, Eike Schneiders, Paul Tennent, Alan Chamberlain, Juan Avila, Pat Brundell, and Simon Castle-Green. 2024. How Artists Improvise and Provoke Robotics. ICSR 2024 - 16th International Conference on Social Robotics – In Press. arXiv pre-print https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22462

Glenn McGarry, Andrew Crabtree, Alan Chamberlain, and Lachlan D Urquhart. 2024. Responsibility and Regulation: Exploring Social Measures of Trust in Medical AI. In Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 27, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686038.3686041

Victor Zhi Heung Ngo, Roma Patel, Rachel Ramchurn, Alan Chamberlain, Ayse Kucukyilmaz. 2024. Dancing with a Robot: An Experimental Study of Child-Robot Interaction in a Performative Art Setting. ICSR 2024 - 16th International Conference on Social Robotics – In Press

Eike Schneiders, Steve Benford, Alan Chamberlain, Clara Mancini, Simon Castle-Green, Victor Ngo, Ju Row Farr, Matt Adams, Nick Tandavanitj, and Joel Fischer. 2024. Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and Humans. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 593, 1–16 https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642115

Paul Coulton, Matthew Pilling, Michael Stead, Andrew Crabtree, Alan Chamberlain, and Neelima Sailaja. 2024. Designing Prosocial More-Than-Human Rhetoric within Experiential Futures. In Proceedings of the 27th International Academic Mindtrek Conference (Mindtrek '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 36–45. https://doi.org/10.1145/3681716.3681726

Kristina Hook, 2024. Designing with the Body: Somaesthetic Interaction Design., MIT Press.

Alan Chamberlain & Andy Crabtree – Eds, 2020. Into the Wild: Beyond the Design Research Lab. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics 48, Springer 2020, ISBN 978-3-030-18018-8

Richard Shusterman, 2012. Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics., Cambridge University Press.