Haunted by design: ghost scenarios in robotics

Conference item

What counts as a “robot” is increasingly contested, yet efforts to define robots often overlook how design practices themselves embed assumptions about the future. Drawing on Lang and Ramírez’s notion of ghost scenarios, we argue that robotic systems materialise often implicit and unexamined contextual assumptions about future labour, care, and human–robot interactions etc. Through examples from industrial and care robotics, we show how these assumptions shape what robots are and what they are expected to do, while foreclosing alternative possibilities. To address this, we reframe robotic design in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) as a future-oriented practice and draw on the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach (OSPA) to propose four principles for engaging with multiple plausible futures. We argue that futures should not be treated as predictions to design for, but as ways of surfacing, contesting, and rethinking assumptions about future contexts and how they shape the design and function of robotic systems.

Authors: Swierczynski, J; Lang, T

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Host title: Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026)
• Publication date: 2026-04-13
• Acceptance date: 2026-04-10
• Event title: Association for Computing Machinery CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026)
• Event location: Barcelona, Spain
• Event website: https://chi2026.acm.org/
• Event start date: 2026-04-13
• Event end date: 2026-04-17
• Language: English