ABSTRACT
As robots travel the globe they are transformed during their integration into new practices in the recipient countries, however the robots act as change agents and reconfigures their surroundings as well. The transformative dimension of integrating social robots highlights how differently they are unpacked, interpreted and understood in various cultural contexts. It emphasizes that the transfer of social robots seems to be more complicated than the transfer of other technologies, because the adaptation to the practices in the recipient countries can be difficult and drawn-out. This challenges our understanding of the phenomenon of technology transfer as well as giving rise to questions about how to understand robots and how to act with them. By studying the transfer of the South Korean socially assistive robots Silbot and Mero to Finland and Denmark we wish to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the integration of socially assistive robots across cultures. We want to move beyond more simplistic notions of successful and failed technology transfers in order to grasp what happened when the South Korean robots were tested in Finnish and Danish recreational homes. This will emphasize that robots, like other travelers, bring along baggage in various shape, content and weight and that this baggage has to be reconfigured in local practice and will allow us to explore the human realm that envelops the robots.
We suggest bringing together sensitizing concepts from sociology, postphenomenology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) to comprehend the attempted integration as a process of human and nonhuman agency as well as an ongoing innovation process. We argue, that by bringing together these different strands of humanistic and social science approaches we are capable of moving away from more static and simplified descriptions of how robots are integrated into practice toward a more exhaustive and dynamic comprehension of the phenomenon.
