We Are the Robots: Tapping Into the Lived Experiences of Wizards of Oz

Paper in proceeding, 2025

After 40 years of use, Wizard of Oz is still a popular method, particularly amongst Human-Robot Interaction researchers. In this Late-Breaking Work, we look into how the lived experiences of those performing the wizardry are represented in literature, and combine it with first-person vignettes from two experienced wizards. These two accounts surface a variety of ethical tensions and issues with the practice of wizarding—reflecting on their impact on the method itself. Through this research, we plan to identify what skills and sensibilities are honed through the practice of emulating imagined social robot agencies. By exposing these ideas, we seek to find other wizards who would like to contribute with their lived experiences to our call to understand and make explicit the obscured dimensions of Wizard of Oz felt by the researchers behind the curtain.