Friction in Processual Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethical Relations in Interdisciplinary Research

Research Background and Issues

• Issues or Challenges: The authors point out that friction—such as disagreements and process breakdowns—is an inevitable phenomenon in interdisciplinary research, yet it rarely appears in formal research reports. They delve into a case study involving professional dancers performing with industrial robots, exploring safety and ethical issues.
• Significance: As industrial robots increasingly enter social and domestic settings, the question of how to interact with robots safely and creatively is no longer merely a technical issue but also involves a reconfiguration of ethical relationships. Investigating friction as part of the research process contributes to a deeper understanding of ethics.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: This study aims to reconceptualize ethics not merely as a tool to reduce friction but as a driving force for reflection and action. Related work includes design research and art-led approaches, which often lose clear direction due to experimental failures and reconfigurations but gain creativity as a result.

Solution

• Method or Solution: The authors adopt a performance-led research approach, inviting disabled dancers to reimagine ethical relationships in human-robot interaction through dance improvisation. The research team consists of experts in dance studies, human-computer interaction, and robot interaction, with professional dancers leading the process in an art-driven manner.
• Innovation: The authors innovatively treat "friction" as an analytical tool to uncover implicit ethics and interdisciplinary collaboration conflicts. Additionally, they redefine ethics through the concept of "process ethics," emphasizing ethics as a dynamic and evolving capacity for action rather than static rules or standards.
• Implementation Steps:
  1. Generating Ethical Uncertainty: Using physical and dance exercises to reveal team members' assumptions and biases about ethics.
  2. Challenging Ethical Assumptions: Leveraging the lived experiences of disabled dancers to challenge existing research ethics models and redefine notions of safety and risk.
  3. Revealing Professional Ethical Differences: Exploring how ethical standards across disciplines lead to misunderstandings and friction.
  4. Reconfiguring Ethical Relationships: Overcoming friction by redistributing ethical responsibilities and adjusting roles within the team to continue the research process.
  5. Cultivating Ethical Sensitivity: Through reflection and interaction at various moments, team members gradually develop deeper ethical awareness toward others and the research process.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes: The authors propose five methods for addressing interdisciplinary friction, including creating spaces for discussion, considering diverse ethical relationships, and reconfiguring responsibilities. They also demonstrate through case studies how friction can be transformed into generative ethical practices.
• Advantages: Compared to traditional static ethical frameworks, this study offers a dynamic and process-driven perspective, emphasizing the flexibility and adaptability of ethical relationships in interdisciplinary collaboration.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results: Through the specific scenario of the "Predator Dance," the study illustrates how friction can reveal ethical assumptions and challenge the habitual ethical thinking of team members. Ethical awareness among team members deepened through practice and continuous reflection.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  1. Limitations: The study did not fully capture the complexity of all ethical tensions, such as the undisclosed presence of a third emergency stop button by team members, indicating that some implicit behaviors may still affect ethical relationships.
  2. Future Directions: The authors suggest further exploration of how friction influences the reconstruction of knowledge and ethics among different members of interdisciplinary teams, while promoting the application of ethics in industrial and academic settings.

Through this study, the authors provide a novel approach for other interdisciplinary teams to address friction and propose a framework for transforming it into generative ethical practices. This method not only fosters new understandings of technology and disability interaction but also offers significant theoretical support for broader research ethics.