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About

Andreas Bischof is a sociologist and human-robot interaction (HRI) researcher whose work sits at the critical intersection of robotics, care studies, and social theory. His scholarship fundamentally interrogates how robots are imagined, designed, and integrated into everyday social worlds — particularly within healthcare and elder care settings. Bischof's most influential contribution, "A Critique of Robotics in Health Care" (2021, 102 citations), challenges the widely promoted narrative that care robots offer straightforward solutions to nursing crises, exposing the gap between technological promise and practical reality. This critical lens extends through his work on affordances and socio-material interaction, where he moves beyond simplistic notions of what technology "does" to users, instead examining how robotic agency and functionality are mutually constructed through situated human practices. A recurring theme in his research is the inadequacy of dominant HRI frameworks. In "Beyond Dyadic HRI" (2022), he argues compellingly that single-user interaction models fail to capture the complex, multi-party dynamics characteristic of real care environments. His book "Soziale Maschinen bauen" (2017) draws on extensive fieldwork across European and North American robotics laboratories to explore how "the social" gets built into machines. Through nearly 230 cumulative citations, Bischof has established himself as a leading critical voice urging robotics researchers to take seriously the messy, irreducible complexity of human everyday worlds.