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1 Chapter 1: Introduction

Social practice (SP) is a well-known theory in psychology introduced to computer science

in recent years. It’s prevalent within the domain of social agents. The reason behind it is that
the experts are theorizing that social practice may lead towards a solution to a long-
existing problem within social agents, which is dynamic deliberative behaviors. However,
social practice is implemented theoretically into matters, mainly because universal formations
and agreements are not present. Therefore, this project will attempt to apply the social
practice to an entertaining humanoid robot, the Pepper robot. And also to evaluate the
possibility of social practice implemented on an actual social agent in a dynamic
environment.
Frank Dignum, the supervisor of this project, proposed a programming framework [20] to
implement SP. The work presented by Frank Dignum in [20], implemented SP on virtual
agents. Ref. [20] also talks about the complexity involved in an agent’s interaction in a
dynamically changing environment like a social environment. An argument is presented
in [20], that SP is an inspiration for designing flexible and scalable interaction
mechanisms that are also robust. The primary focus of this project is to extend the
proposed framework by Frank Dignum [20] onto a physical robot like Pepper.

1.1 Background

The social practice in computer science is not a much-used domain, which leads to little
to no information for educational researches. Therefore, the programmers applying social
practice on dynamic agents need to agree on the definitions of specific notations. The
nota- tions presented in this paper follow the description made by Frank Dignum in [20],
which may differ from other notations in other studies. As per [20], if you use SP in
computer science, you need to make them more precise and implementable. A formal
representation of SP is the starting point, and Frank Dignum himself has provided one
approach in [20].
The social practice theory explains the pattern behind actions and contexts between
humans in social situations. The idea was founded and improved by various philosophers,
such as Bourdieu [24], Giddens [7], Reckwitz, and Shove [18, 22]. The theory suggests that
humans are following social practice to perform necessarily everyday actions. Regardless,
our life goes by social practice; even if we may not be aware of it, we act, react and
improvise based on what we learned previously and make it suit the best out of situations.
To simplify, what social practice means is expecting to do things in a “socially accepted”
way. When you see a friend on the street, the most accepted and common way to react is
to greet your friend; the action will most likely positively impact your relationship with
your friend. Throughout our lives, we continuously learn the most accepted ways of
doing things to get along with other people. Humans are social beings, after all, and this
learning process is what social practice stands for.