Animal Robot Island exhibit

For the recent ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society annual symposium, Deborah Lupton and Megan Rose mounted an exhibit called Animal Robot Island.

With this installation, we seek to surface the broader difficult issues of the environmental impacts of AI and automated technologies, acknowledging that human and planetary health are intertwined and interdependent. This installation is part of the Centre of Excellence’s new signature project on ADM, Ecosystems and Multispecies Relationships. As contributors to this project, we are exploring the relational and affective ties that are generated when humans come together with robotic animal devices. We seek to make connections between the ethical issues that are raised concerning the benefits and harms of human-animal and human-robot relationships.

Our research asks the following questions:

  • What can help us live better with our robotic animal companions in ways that benefit humans without harming the environment and other animals and living things?
  • What do we like about robotic animals?
  • What do we find creepy or discomforting about them?

Animal Robot Island is inhabited by robotic animal creatures living together in apparent harmony. Its visual appearance is inspired by the popular Nintendo video game Animal Crossing, a social simulation game which invites players to create a village inhabited by cute anthropomorphic animal creatures. Animal Crossing was created to encourage players to engage with the simulated ‘natural’ world by cultivating plants, fruit picking, collecting seashells, catching insects, fishing and hunting for fossils as well as living alongside the animal creatures in the village.

Like Animal Crossing, Animal Robot Island is a soft, welcoming space, with references to kawaii (Japanese cute culture) and gamification of animals for care, connection, comfort and entertainment. But there are hints at a darker, more sinister underbelly of this apparently sweet, colourful world. We reflect on the question of how these kinds of idealised communities/ecosystems harm the ‘real’ natural environment and wonder what happens to these creatures when they ‘die’? Where do their ‘remains’ (the waste left behind by their electronic, plastics and fabric components) go?

Autism supports project underway

Our project ‘Non-human Supports Used by Autistic People for Connection, Health and Wellbeing’ is well underway. This autistic-led project explores how autistic people employ a range of objects, services and creatures to support their wellbeing and find comfort, care and connection. The study’s findings offer insights into the everyday and creative ways that autistic people understand, (re)imagine and engage with non-human support activities, practices and things. It is co-funded by the Vitalities Lab and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.

For the study, autistic adults were interviewed online by project lead Dr Megan Rose. The interview questions asked participants about the kinds of supports (other than people) they use as part of their everyday lives: e.g. for entertainment and leisure, connection with others, cultivating a special interest, dealing with burnout or sensory challenges, and promoting health and wellbeing.

We informed participants that we were taking a very broad view in defining ‘supports’, including ‘things, places and creatures that help you get through the day as an autistic person and deal with any challenges or difficulties’. Participants were asked what supports they used most regularly, what they found most useful or helpful, whether there were any aspects about these supports they didn’t like, which was their favourite support activity or thing (if any), and to explain their answers. The final question asked participants: ‘If you had the chance to design a new support activity or thing to help you in your everyday life – what would it be? How would it help you? What would it look like?’

We have made a short film about some of the participants’ experiences, which can be viewed here.

Currently we are writing academic papers and conference presentations to communicate the findings from the project. We are also working with the wonderful graphic illustrator Sarah Firth, who we commissioned to make ‘portraits’ of each participant using words and images to depict the challenges they face, the supports they use to help them cope with these challenges, and their special interests. We’ll be using these portraits in both our academic outputs and in public-facing open access publications to share with the autistic community and other interested people.

New book now out – ‘Risk’, 3rd edition

Deborah Lupton's avatarThis Sociological Life

The third revised edition of my book Risk, first published in 1999, and second edition published in 2013, is now out. The book has been extensively revised and expanded to take account of the risks that have emerged over the past decade.

A link to the book on Routledge’s website is here and the Google Books preview is here.

Below is the Preface I wrote for the third edition.

In the 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century, risk was a key word in both public forums and academic research. The word ‘risk’ was used across social domains and institutions. The sociocultural and political aspects of risk and identifying the reasons for this intensification on risk identification, communication and management were a major preoccupation in the social sciences. The release in 1992 of the English translation of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society:…

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