Fragile robots and coincidental innovation

Abstract

This chapter explores how Socio-gerontechnology can develop analyses that interfere with pervasive discourses on technology and ageing in ways that work against singularity and fixity. Inspired by recent debates in Science and Technology Studies about a turn to ontology, we analyse the emergence of prototypes in an innovation project seeking to develop digital solutions for older people. We analyse two prototypes, the Telenoid and the Tiles, through their appearance in different socio-material situations and inspired by the notion that apparently stabile things and realities can contain ‘shadowlands of alterity’. The analysis attends to alterity in different ways, by depicting the prototypes in ways that differ from dominating narratives about innovation and robotics and by showing how the prototypes ‘differed from themselves’ in the way that they were bound up with different political ontologies in different situations dependent on the circumstances in which they were made to emerge. We propose that the ontological debates present and enforce a mode of reflexivity that may enable Socio-gerontechnology studies to engage with their subject matters in new ways in order to avoid and interfere with reified and potentially stereotypical ideas about ageing, technology and innovation.