Towards a Wave Approach for Value Sensitive Design in Social Robotics

Even though a broad range of social robots are currently available on the market, social robots are not yet an integral part of companies, healthcare providers, or public institutions. This might be due to the fact that the prevalent developer perspective immanently focuses on technological advancements, whereas a human-centered view remains underrepresented. In this paper, we argue that a human-centered perspective which integrates values and beliefs of relevant technology stakeholders needs to complement existing approaches to social robot design. Therefore, we propose to apply value sensitive design (VSD) to improve the process of social robot development and design. Even though VSD has become popular in recent years and it represents an established approach to foster innovative technologies, it has not yet been widely applied in the context of social robotics. Concretely, in this paper we will outline the added value of using VSD for social robots and we will explain how to utilize this methodology to enrich research and practice in social robotics.