Reading robots: representation, interpretation, design

This essay examines real and fictional robots as co-constitutive representational objects whose imbrication makes the analysis of robot fictions especially important for robot design. It begins with an overview of the history of this entanglement, the design methodology it inspires, and the generative potential of highlighting the relationality and affordances of designed objects. The second part of the essay offers case studies that highlight the insights provided by ‘reading robots’ as representational objects. These case studies are catalysts for speculative thinking about the possibilities for a hermeneutic approach to robot design indebted to a feminist ethic of response-ability, which stresses more-than-human beings as fundamentally relational, responsive, entangled phenomena.