Background

During the 23/24 academic year we conducted a series of ‘lab visits’ linked to each of our four Technical Affordance Projects (TAPS) - Immersive, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and High Performance Networks.

The Technical Affordance Projects take digital technologies as the object of interdisciplinary inquiry. Through them, we explore the complexities of sociodigital futures in-the-making which they enable or project.

These visits were open to all staff from across the Centre. Colleagues who were not familiar with the technologies were particularly encouraged to attend.

Our approach

The purpose of the visits was to build sociodigital capacity by expanding social researchers’ knowledge and understanding of each technology.

Each visit was organized with the following content: (1) direct experience of ‘the technology; (2) an overview of latest work in each area, adjusted for an interdisciplinary group – taking (1) and (2) together this acted as a ‘crash immersion’ in each technical field, for social scientists and humanities researchers, as well as for technical researchers in the different disciplines. The visits also included (3) field-testing sociodigital theories and methods to explore what particular concepts and approaches would bring to studying these specific technologies. The programme of visits was cumulative, with each session building on the previous one(s) and linking into further activities across CenSoF.  

The design of the sessions took everyone out of their comfort zone – with social scientists, humanities and arts scholars engaging directly with specialist technical research, and engineers engaging with social theory focused on their own area of research. This was done in a collaborative space, designed to encourage active questioning of our own disciplines’ expertise, assumptions and knowledge gaps, and learning how to collaborate with others to address this. The serves as a critical foundation for building and extending collaborative sociodigital projects across CenSoF.

Through these we have grown a wider network of engagement between social scientists and engineers, drawing in engineers in each of the labs, beyond our original CI team who have been inspired to represent their work with the Centre’s sociodigital research questions in mind.

Opportunities and outcomes

The Centre’s thinking has been embedded within a wider network of research including through training for Engineering PDRAs who are now participating in Centre events and design of new PhD projects in engineering. Visits have also led to impact beyond the Centre for example, the Robotics Growth Partnership now highlighting the need to consider the sociotechnical aspects when writing robotics roadmaps. A number of interdisciplinary funding bids to UKRI and other sources are also in development.

CenSoF investigators: Kirsten Cater, David M Evans, Susan Halford, Sabine Hauert, Rasheed Hussain, Weiru Liu, Dan McQuillan.

Partners and collaborators: Bristol Interaction Group and Immersive colleagues, Bristol Robotics Laboratory colleagues, Intelligent Systems Laboratory colleagues, Smart Internet Lab colleagues.