Somabotics: Creatively Embodying AI

Project Leader: Professor Steve Benford
Official Project Website: https://www.somabotics.ac.uk/

Research Funding: UKRI Turing AI World Leading Researcher Fellowship Somabotics: Creatively Embodying Artificial Intelligence

Status: Ongoing

Project Description

Robots can move, sense, and act on the everyday world, including on our own human bodies. As people increasingly engage in physical and intimate contact with intelligent machines, the Fellowship explores how artist-driven aesthetic experiences can generate new meanings and interactions between people and machines that could advance robotics in care, mobility, and more besides.

Somabotics: Creatively Embodying AI pursues a distinctive approach to this challenge by drawing on the expertise of artists to deliver creative applications of emerging technologies, surface new design concepts and methods, engage the public with societal challenges, and deliver impact to the creative industries. We also build on a method called soma design to provides techniques and toolkits for placing the human body at the centre of technology design that has already proved beneficial to application in health and wellbeing.

The Fellowship is centred on four artist-led projects:

Different Bodies Dancing with Robots
partnered with Coventry Centre for Dance Research and Candoco Dance Company

Embrace Angels
partnered with Lancel/Maat

Intelligent Instruments
partnered with the World Academy of Irish Music and Dance & Birmingham Conservatoire

Pamper Factory
partnered with Blast Theory

The Fellowship also includes the projects Soma Labels and Soma Skins.

As part of the Fellowship, I contribute expertise in the theory, practice and teaching of the soma design method. My research develops generative ethical strategies for interdisciplinary AI and robotics research and human-machine interaction design. I also co-ordinate the Fellowships’s international partnership with KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Highlighted Publications

See the Somabotics website for a full list of research outputs from this project.

[Pre-Print] Garrett, Brundell, Castle-Green, Hawkins, Tennent, Zhou, Lampinen, Höök, and Benford. 2025. Friction in Processual Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethical Relations in Interdisciplinary Research. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714123

[Pre-Print] Garrett & Hawkins, Brundell, Castle-Green, Tennent, Zhou, Lampinen, Höök, and Benford. 2025. In the Moment of Glitch: Engaging with Misalignments in Ethical Practice. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713632