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About the workshop:

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Participatory design (PD) can improve the quality of design by encouraging mutual benefits of improved design and increased acceptance, trust, and connection of users. PD strategies can support designers in developing SARs that meet users’ needs, capabilities, and preferences. Rogers et al. [1] identified three key phases for PD in HRI; initial interview phase, focus groups phase, and presentation phase. Following the initial interview phase and exploratory workshops with users [2], we developed a Toolkit that aims to increase communication with users by providing them with means for conveying their needs and interpretations of robotic features. The Toolkit aims to support the PD process in exploratory focus groups. The current generation of SARs is more of a “one form fits all”, where designers and manufacturers produce one form of a robot and deploy it to multiple use cases. Recent research points to the importance of fitting the SAR’s design to its desired role and characteristics and fitting its Visual Qualities (VQs) to increase acceptance and satisfaction [3,4]. 

 

This workshop will combine short research talks, instruction, and hands-on experiences with a PD Toolkit for designing socially assistive robots (SARs) in different use contexts. We aim to facilitate knowledge sharing among enthusiastic researchers from various HRI disciplines: designers, human factors and interaction, and roboticists and create communication opportunities that could help the more extensive HRI community work towards generating design toolkits for SARs that are better fit to their role and context of use.

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In this workshop, we will

• Present experiences from the automotive industry and its design context being closer to robotics as one may expect

• Present a design toolkit for the design of SARs

• Discuss different tools and methods of PD

• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of PD

• Introduce a new design toolkit and experience a design focus group

• Create guidelines for successful PD strategies

 

Intended audience: enthusiastic researchers from various HRI disciples: designers, human factors and interaction, and roboticists

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References

1. Rogers, W. A., Kadylak, T., & Bayles, M. A. (2022). Maximizing the Benefits of Participatory Design for Human–Robot Interaction Research With Older Adults. Human Factors, 64(3), 441–450. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187208211037465

2. Bulgaro, A., Liberman-Pincu, E., & Oron-Gilad, T. (2022). Participatory Design in Socially Assistive Robots for Older Adults: bridging the gap between elicitation methods and the generation of design requirements. arXiv preprint arXiv: 2206.10990.

3. Liberman-Pincu, E., Van Grondelle, E. D., & Oron-Gilad, T. (2021, March). Designing robots with relationships in mind: Suggesting two models of human-socially assistive robot (SAR) relationship. In Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 555-558).‏ 

4. Liberman-Pincu, E., van Grondelle, E.D., and Oron-Gilad. T Designing robots with the context in mind- One design does not fit all. Accepted to Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR) 2022, Delft, The Netherlands.