Telepresence robots have the potential to change our experiences in galleries and museums, allowing for a range of hybrid interactions for visitors and museum professionals, improving accessibility, offering activities or information, and providing a range of practical use cases (e.g. the robots augmenting museum exhibits).We present the results of 3 qualitative studies conducted in the UK exploring the acceptability (1 -interviews with museum professionals with no previous exposure to telepresence), acceptance (2 -focus groups for initial exposure to telepresence robots), and adoption (3 -interviews with museum professionals with long-term exposure to

This research study scopes the ethical implications associated with the deployment of social robots within workplace environments, in the context of an increased need of employee wellbeing. Progress in the domains of artificial intelligence (AI) and social robotics present a potential avenue for improving workplace wellbeing. However, it is necessary conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the impacts and ethical considerations associated with these emerging technologies. For this purpose, we carried out an ethical risk assessment for a telepresence robot programmed to function as a social robot in the workplace, which we named ’Cheerbot’. After introducing Cheerbot’s functions, the paper describes an ethical risk assessment process, which involves identifying potential hazards, the likelihood of the hazard occurring, potential consequences (harms), and a risk exposure rating for each hazard. Results are presented for three hypothetical scenarios, and potential mitigations for the highest rated risks are suggested. The findings highlight the value of proactively identifying and mitigating ethical risks from harms, ensuring responsible deployment of robotics aimed at supporting workplace wellbeing.

While ethical challenges are widely discussed in HCI, far less is reported about the ethical processes that researchers routinely navigate. We reflect on a multispecies project that negotiated an especially complex ethical approval process. Cat Royale was an artist-led exploration of creating an artwork to engage audiences in exploring trust in autonomous systems. The artwork took the form of a robot that played with three cats. Gaining ethical approval required an extensive dialogue with three Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) covering computer science, veterinary science and animal welfare, raising tensions around the welfare of the cats, perceived benefits and appropriate methods, and reputational risk to the University. To reveal these tensions we introduce beneficiary-epistemology space, that makes explicit who benefits from research (humans or animals) and underlying epistemologies. Positioning projects and IRBs in this space can help clarify tensions and highlight opportunities to recruit additional expertise.

Volunteering benefits recipients, volunteers, communities, and society, while digital technologies establish new opportunities for virtual volunteering. We describe how volunteers transitioned the UK's long-established Oxjam grassroots music festival online in response to the COVID pandemic, delivering a local pilot before scaling up nationwide. We adopt an infrastructural perspective to reveal how two teams of volunteers defined a flexible festival format, knitted together diverse technologies into a technical platform, and operated this to deliver the festival. We highlight the need for teams of volunteers to orchestrate both audience and performer trajectories through festivals. We argue for deliberately designing in volunteer labour rather than automating it out by translating traditional roles online while defining new digital ones. We propose to make these roles rewarding through a more social volunteer experience, including privileged backstage access. We highlight the challenges of using social media for such events, including complying with algorithmic policing of rights.