Designing with Fallibility: Examining the Knowledge Politics of Agency, Methods, and Motivations in Robot Failure Research

A line of research in HCI and HRI has started to consider robot failures, errors, and breakdowns not as problems to be eliminated, but as opportunities to inform and enrich design. This shift has led to growing interest in how robotic fallibility affects user trust, interaction quality, and system acceptance. In this paper, we inquire into what it means to design with fallibility. Drawing on feminist technoscience, we examine how current approaches frame the roles of designers and users (agency), how research methods shape the phenomena they study (performativity), and how underlying research goals carry ethical and epistemological implications (motivation). In recognizing robotic fallibility as a sociotechnical phenomenon and design research as a world-making practice, we provide design considerations that promote more reflexive, inclusive, and politically aware engagements with (robot) failure in HRI and HCI.