Choreographing Trash Cans: On Speculative Futures of Weak Robots in Public Spaces

Michio Okada first conceptualised "weak robots", which have limited capabilities themselves, and are framed as objects or "social others" which people are invited to assist and take care of. In Okada's work, such robots are used to invite pro-social behaviour from people, such as encouraging them to pick up trash to assist a trash can robot (Okada (2022)). We conceptualise human-robot interaction (HRI) as a stage where weak robots-- designed to be "cute" and vulnerable--play the role of incidental actors that subvert the person engaging with them. Caudwell and Lacey (2020) argue that cuteness as a design choice for robots can encourage users to trust and form relationships with those robots, which introduces ambivalent power dynamics through the production of intimacy . In fact, cuteness can also be seen as a deceptive or "dark" pattern, due to the utilisation of cuteness to prompt affective responses which can be used to collect emotional data, as well as some degree of reduction of user agency (Lacey and Caudwell (2019)). The ability and affordances of cute and weak robots to influence user behaviour merits the discussion of their ethicality, which we do in this paper through design fiction. Unlike traditional HRI research, often confined to laboratory settings, our focus is on spontaneous, real-world interactions that transform everyday environments into sites of performative potential. We argue that the theatricality of these encounters is central to understanding their impact: the presence of a weak and/or cute robot, such as the trash can robot, developed by Okada and the Interaction and Communication Design Lab of the T oyohashi University of T echnology, acts as a disruptive interloper that introduces an observer's effect and, thus, affects the human interlocutors. First, we examine the concept of weak robots through the lens of performativity theory as well as concepts of machine (dys)function.