The politics of co-creative innovation assumes an almost universal interconnectability of technology and society. It radicalises the already ubiquitous assertion that technology’s transformative potential can be interconnected to almost any societal problem (Pfotenhauer/Jasanoff 2017). This can be observed in the case of care robots, where the call for more participation and user-centred design is especially common (Compagna/Kohlbacher 2015) – despite (or because of?) the fact that the benefits of robots in actual care practice remain far from obvious (Neven 2010). Here, persistent efforts to prototype robots in care-like environments and to interest potential end-users (elderly people, caregivers etc.) as co-creators are hoped to eventually secure ‘safe passage’ for robots into care. I reconstruct these efforts through an analytics of interfacing (Lipp 2017) arguing that the matter of course, with which robotics and care, technology and society are taken as interconnectable is not self-evident but rather the effect of a novel techno-political “positivity” (Foucault 1982), which relies on the production of formerly disparate elements as interconnectable. A case study of setting up a European pre-commercial procurement project for care robotics will show that co-creation does not simply rely on the availability of interested publics but rather intensifies the need for investing in their interessement (Akrich et al. 2002). This means that their concerns need to be continuously co-adapted vis-à-vis one another. Hence, the techno-politics of co-creation alludes to the procedural logic of interfacing: who or what needs to be interconnected with whom or what – and what gets lost on the way?     «

The politics of co-creative innovation assumes an almost universal interconnectability of technology and society. It radicalises the already ubiquitous assertion that technology’s transformative potential can be interconnected to almost any societal problem (Pfotenhauer/Jasanoff 2017). This can be observed in the case of care robots, where the call for more participation and user-centred design is especially common (Compagna/Kohlbacher 2015) – despite (or because of?) the fact that the benefits...     »