In the Moment of Glitch: Engaging with Misalignments in Ethical Practice

Garrett, Rachael; Hawkins, Kat; Brundell, Patrick; Castle-Green, Simon; Tennent, Paul; Zhou, Feng; Lampinen, Airi; Höök, Kristina; Benford, Steve

Abstract

Glitches – moments when technologies do not work as desired – will become increasingly common as industrially-designed robots move into complex contexts. Taking glitches to be potential sites of critical ethical reflection, we examine a glitch that occurred in the context of a collaborative research project where professional dancers with different disabilities improvised with a robotic arm. Through a first-person account, we analyse how the dancer, the robot, and the rest of the research team enacted ethics in the moment of glitch. Through this analysis, we discovered a deep and implicit ethical misalignment wherein our enactments of ethics in response to the glitch did not align with the values of the project. This prompted a critical re-engagement with our research process through which we forged a dialogue between different ethical perspectives that acted as an invitation to bring us back into ethical alignment with the project’s values.

Citation

Garrett, R., Hawkins, K., Brundell, P., Castle-Green, S., Tennent, P., Zhou, F., Lampinen, A., Höök, K., & Benford, S. (2025, April). In the Moment of Glitch: Engaging with Misalignments in Ethical Practice. Presented at CHI 2025: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama, Japan

• Presentation Conference Type: Edited Proceedings
• Conference Name: CHI 2025: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Start Date: Apr 26, 2025
• End Date: May 1, 2025
• Acceptance Date: Jul 24, 2025
• Online Publication Date: Apr 25, 2025
• Publication Date: Apr 25, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jul 24, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 25, 2025
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Article Number: 407
• Pages: 1 - 18
• Book Title: CHI '25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 979-8-4007-1394-1
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713632
• Keywords: ethics; felt ethics; research ethics; artist-led research; somabotics; robots; dance; disability; crip feminism; glitches; misalignment
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/48209201
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706598.3713632