Friction in Processual Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethical Relations in Interdisciplinary Research

Friction – disagreement and breakdown – is an omnipresent aspect of conducting interdisciplinary research yet is rarely presented in formal research reporting. We analyse a performance-led research process where professional dancers with different disabilities explored how to improvise with an industrial robot, with the support of an interdisciplinary team of human-computer and human-robot interaction researchers. We focus on one site of friction in our research process; how to dance – safely – with robots? By presenting our research process, we exemplify the different ways in which we encountered this friction and how we reconfigured the research process around it. We contribute five ways in which we arrived at a generative ethical outcome, which may be helpful in productively engaging with friction in interdisciplinary collaboration.