Inventing Japan’s ‘robotics culture’: The repeated assembly of science, technology, and culture in social robotics

Using interviews, participant observation, and published documents, this article analyzes the co-construction of robotics and culture in Japan through the technical discourse and practices of robotics researchers. Three cases from current robotics research – the seal-like robot PARO, the Humanoid Robotics Project HRP-2 humanoid, and ‘kansei robotics’ – show the different ways in which scientists invoke culture to provide epistemological grounding and possibilities for social acceptance of their work. These examples show how the production and consumption of social robotic technologies are associated with traditional crafts and values, how roboticists negotiate among social, technical, and cultural constraints while designing robots, and how humans and robots are constructed as cultural subjects in social robotics discourse. The conceptual focus is on the repeated assembly of cultural models of social behavior, organization, cognition, and technology through roboticists’ narratives about the development of advanced robotic technologies. This article provides a picture of robotics as the dynamic construction of technology and culture and concludes with a discussion of the limits and possibilities of this vision in promoting a culturally situated understanding of technology and a multicultural view of science.