Sensual Environmental Robots: Entanglements of Speculative Realist Ideas with Design Theory and Practice

Abstract In response to this issue’s theme of Can robots be sensual? two propositions are discussed from a design researcher’s perspective. Four devices across two speculative projects Habitat Robots and Soil Protector Robots are presented. Speculative Realist ideas provide reasoning for design approaches to metaphorise sensed environmental data into multi-sensorial performances that the devices embody. Facilitated through the projects are philosophy of design concerns, such as asymmetrical relations, the nature of data, and language about the devices prefiguring sensorial expectations. The performative behaviours of these multi-sensorial robots evoke a sense of things by removing the truthiness of data and thereby emancipating language from privilege and expertise, subverting expectations of technology, and notions of urban Nature. Through Harman’s Quadruple Object, we speculate on asymmetricality within object relations, including between the devices and the practices of design itself. Thereby, allowing ontological design implications to be reviewed – where acts of designing in turn design us; design processes are not only entwined prefiguratively, but are companion output artefacts of these technological ecology interfaces. The devices bring together and physicalise questions of contextual boundaries and politics between humans, technology, and Nature.