Designing robots that people can relate to and understand requires shaping their embodiment and behavior in service of their purpose and use, without getting stuck in predominant robot stereotypes. With this work, we delineate the hybridity of robotic artifacts and discuss leveraging hybridity towards more thoughtful design. In an online study, we asked 103 participants to look at videos featuring robots being active in different contexts. After each video, participants were asked to share their impressions of the robots through questionnaires designed to evaluate four aspects: (1) ontological categorization, (2) behavioral attributions, (3) interaction considerations, and (4) perceived value. Through an interpretative analysis, the hybridity of robotic artifacts is delineated by tracing back responses of participants on the questionnaire items to its video contents through visual inspection. We discuss how the hybridity of robotic artifacts can be traced back to three distinct framings - products for use, social actors, and animate entities - that inform their perceived functional and affective value. Furthermore, we explore how these framings can merge into more complex configurations, including portrayals of robots as objects with intent, as entities that reveal a spectrum of more-than-human sociabilities, and as prompts for discussions about human-robot coexistences. We conclude by reflecting on these findings to consider how leveraging hybridity can inform more thoughtful design approaches in human-robot interaction.

The 3rd Workshop on Designerly Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) aims to bring together scholars and practitioners engaged in design-oriented research to articulate the value of design research within HRI broadly. We propose a half-day workshop to (1) collectively map the diversity of design research in HRI, examining how contributions are framed and how quality is evaluated; (2) discuss participants’ HRI design projects, showcased in an exhibition setting; and (3) conclude with a focused conversation to identify common ground across diverse approaches and develop strategies for strengthening the position of design research in HRI and its connections with other HRI disciplinary communities.

Building on two previous workshops on transdisciplinary practices for shaping worker-robot relations, this half-day workshop introduces participants to worldbuilding, a design-driven technique used to co-create and explore richly detailed futures, as a way to empower workers and scholars in reimagining plausible and preferable future worker-robot relations (WRRs). WRRs describe the interactions, collaborations, and shared practices between workers and robotic systems in organisational contexts. The workshop begins with an introduction to WRRs, and a keynote by a worldbuilding expert that will outline the method and its value for envisioning future WRRs. Groups of workshop participants will then investigate concrete case studies that demonstrate how robotic systems can support workers in their practice, with a focus on enhancing wellbeing. Through interactive activities in this workshop, participants will co-create imagined worlds of work, which will be analyzed systemically across multiple levels of complexity, from the individual worker and their immediate context to broader societal implications. The workshop ultimately aims to build a community committed to shaping sustainable futures of robot-assisted work.

Given the increasing challenges in today’s healthcare landscape, the role of health promotion and care delivery in home settings is gaining importance. Social robots have emerged as promising tools to support this shift, offering assistance, motivation, and companionship to patients and caregivers. However, their integration into home-based healthcare remains limited. To understand the underlying reasons, this study systematically reviews the literature, identifying the enablers and barriers to the deployment and use of social robots in home environments. Seven electronic databases (Medline, Embase, Web of Science, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Google Scholar) were searched in June 2023 and July 2024. After screening and eligibility assessment, 39 studies, involving actual human-robot interaction and conducted in real home environments, were included and appraised using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. Data extracted from these studies were synthesized thematically. The results show that all studies were conducted in high-income countries, with most focusing on older adults and employing high-cost, anthropomorphic robots that were rarely co-designed with users. The findings suggest that the deployment and use of social robots are shaped by an interplay of the characteristics of interaction, context, robot, and user. They also point to a lack of holistic consideration of these characteristics, limited attention to ethical and legal aspects, and insufficient stakeholder inclusion in current design and implementation practices. To address these limitations, future research may benefit from ecological, participatory, speculative, and performative design approaches that support the development of more inclusive, adaptive, and ethical social robots for home-based healthcare.

Recent developments in health research increasingly frame health as relational and situated - emerging through interactions among bodies, environments, institutions, and technologies. Translating this into the design of robotic care technologies, particularly those involving movement-based Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), remains a challenge. This paper proposes a relational approach to the design of movement-based robotic systems for health and care contexts that integrates the knowledge and expertise of the performing arts, alongside care stakeholders. First, we describe our methodological approach for integrating the performing arts into relational HRI design for health applications, focusing on Fizzy (a minimalistic, robotic ball that supports health promotion and caregiving to older adults) as a design case. Drawing from two interdisciplinary studies, we analyse how Speculative Enactments (SE) and Participatory Design (PD) can inform the design of movement-based HRI from a relational standpoint. Second, we report on three design lessons learned during these studies: (1) take your lead from the materiality of the robotic platform, (2) frame encounters to steer the interpretation in specific ways, (3) attend to emergent movement patterns in situated interactions. Together, these methodological and design insights contribute to a relational approach for designing movement-based robotic technologies that support health and wellbeing through embodied, situated encounters.

A plethora of toolkits, checklists, and workshops have been developed to bridge the well-documented gap between AI ethics principles and practice. Yet little is known about effects of such interventions on practitioners. We conducted an ethnographic investigation in a major European city organization that developed and works to integrate an ethics toolkit into city operations. We find that the integration of ethics tools by technical teams desta-bilises their boundaries, roles, and mandates around responsibilities and decisions. This lead to emotional discomfort and feelings of vulnerability, which neither toolkit designers nor the organization had accounted for.We leverage the concept of moral stress to argue that this affective experience is a core challenge to the successful integration of ethics tools in technical practice. Even in this best case scenario, organisational structures were not able to deal with moral stress that resulted from attempts to implement responsible technology development practices.

In this article, we report on methodological insights gained from a workshop in which we collaborated with theater professionals to enact situated encounters between humans and robots on a mixed reality stage combining VR with real-life interaction. We deployed the skills of theater professionals to investigate the behaviors of humans encountering robots to speculate about the kind of interactions that may result from encountering robots in supermarket settings. The mixed reality stage made it possible to adapt the robot’s morphology quickly, as well as its movement and perceptual capacities, to investigate how this together co-determines possibilities for interaction. This setup allowed us to follow the interactions simultaneously from different perspectives, including the robot’s, which provided the basis for a collective phenomenological analysis of the interactions. Our work contributes to approaches to HRI that do not work toward identifying communicative behaviors that can be universally applied but instead work toward insights that can be used to develop HRI that is emergent, and situation- and robot-specific. Furthermore, it supports a more-than-human-design approach that takes the fundamental differences between humans and robots as a starting point for the creative development of new kinds of communication and interaction.

Social robots have become increasingly prominent in the realm of physical activity promotion. However, the technological complexity and primarily anthropomorphic designs of these robots pose challenges for their application in everyday settings. This study positions spherical robots as an emerging subtype of social robots and explores their potential to promote physical activity at home by identifying useful behavioral design patterns. To this end, we engaged theater professionals and human-robot interaction researchers in a 4-day workshop, leveraging a speculative design methodology. A puppeteer controlling a robotic ball and two actors improvised human-robot encounters in a staged home setting. These encounters were analyzed to identify instances where the ball triggered physical activity. From this analysis, we extracted nine design patterns that articulate robot behaviors for initiating physical interaction. Additionally, our findings revealed that these patterns could be combined into complex sequences to sustain physical activities, which are experienced as meaningful when framed within a narrative. We discuss the contents of these patterns and their potential value for home-based healthcare applications. Our contribution lies in articulating the potential of spherical robots for promoting physical activity at home through design patterns informed by a performative approach to human-robot interaction.

This paper looks at how contestation in the context of algorithmic decision systems is essentially the progeny of repair for our more decentralized and abstracted digital world. The act of repair has often been a way for users to contest with bad design, substandard products, and disappointing outcomes—not to mention often being a necessary aspect of ensuring effective use over time. As algorithmic systems continue to make more decisions about our lives and futures, we need to look for new ways to contest their outcomes and repair potentially broken systems. Through looking at examples of contemporary repair and contestation and tracing the history of electronics repair from discrete components into the decentralized systems of today, we look at how the shared values of repair and contestation help surface ways to approach contestation using tactics of the Right to Repair movement and the instincts of the Fixer. Finally, we speculate on roles, communities, and a move towards an agonistic interaction space where response-ability rests more equally across user, designer, and system.

Using HRI theory to inform robot development is an important, but difficult, endeavor. This paper explores the relationship between HRI theory and HRI practice through a design project on the development of design guidelines for human-robot communication together with a dairy farming robot manufacturer. The design guidelines, a type of intermediate-level knowledge, were intended to enrich the specialized knowledge of the company on farming context with relevant academic knowledge. In this process, we identified that HRI theories were used as a frame, a tool, best practices, and a reference; while the HRI practice provided a context, a reference, and validation for the theories. Our intended contribution is to propose a means to facilitate exchanges both ways between HRI theory and practice and add to the emerging repertoire of designerly ways of producing knowledge in HRI.

Purpose: eHealth-based exercise therapies were developed to increase stroke patients’ adherence to home-based motor rehabilitation. However, these eHealth tools face a rapid decrease in use after a couple of weeks. This study investigates stroke patients’ motivation for home-based upper extremity rehabilitation with eHealth tools and their relation with Basic Psychological Needs. Materials and methods: This is a qualitative study using thematic analysis. We conducted semi-structured interviews with stroke patients with upper extremity motor impairments, who were discharged home from a rehabilitation centre, after they interacted with a novel eHealth coach demonstrator in their homes for five consecutive days. Results: We included ten stroke patients. Thematic analysis resulted in eight themes for home-based rehabilitation motivation: Curiosity, Rationale, Choice, Optimal challenge, Reference, Encouragement, Social Support and Trustworthiness. Those themes are embedded into three Basic Psychological Needs: “Autonomy”, “Competence”, and “Relatedness”. Conclusion: Eight motivational themes related to the three Basic Psychological Needs describe stroke patients’ motivation for home-based upper extremity rehabilitation. We recommend considering those themes when developing a home-based eHealth intervention for stroke patients to increase the alignment of eHealth tools to the patient’s needs and reduce motivational decreases in home-based rehabilitation.

Dit artikel beschrijft de vorderingen in het Brightsky-project, waarin de potentie voor robotondersteuning wordt onderzocht, met en voor vakmensen bij KLM Engine Services die daar reparatiewerk uitvoeren. Door de samenwerking met vakmensen centraal te stellen, wordt er onderzocht hoe robotondersteuning niet alleen fysiek werk kan verlichten, maar ook kan bijdragen aan een betekenisvolle werkervaring. Hiermee wordt gepoogd een brug te slaan tussen de focus van human factors zoals we die kennen als discipline, en een meer holistische benadering die diepe kennis van vakmensen, innovatie-experts, robotici, ontwerpers, psychologen en organisatiewetenschappers aanwendt.

The water motion computed using 3D and 2DH models in tidally dominated shallow waters can, in some cases, differ significantly. In 2DH models, bed friction is typically parametrised in terms of the depth-averaged velocity, whereas in 3D models, typically the near-bed velocity is used. This difference causes the bed shear stress in 2DH models to point towards the depth-averaged velocity, whereas in 3D models, it points towards the near-bed velocity, which are not necessarily the same. Focussing on linearised barotropic models, we derive an exact friction parametrisation for 2DH models such that the same depth-averaged dynamics are described as in the corresponding 3D model. The result is a convolutional friction formulation where the instantaneous friction depends on the present and past velocities, thus modifying the traditional 2DH friction formulation that only depends on the present depth-averaged velocity. In the case of harmonic (tidal) waves, this parametrisation has a clear physical interpretation and shows that the near-bed velocity should be parametrised as a rotated, deformed and phase shifted variant of the depth-averaged velocity. We demonstrate that in certain regions of the parameter space, it may be impossible to calibrate a 2DH model that uses a traditional friction law to reproduce the water levels from a 3D model, showing that the 3D friction formulation can be crucial to capture the 3D dynamics within a depth-averaged model. This phenomenon is explored in detail in a narrow well-mixed estuary.

eHealth solutions at home are gaining interest and relevance in healthcare; however, they face challenges in sustaining motivation for therapy due to difficulties in creating meaningful connections between technology and people receiving care. In this article, we explore how embodied agents in eHealth interventions could be designed to establish a motivating relationship with people in the context of home-based stroke rehabilitation. We studied this potential by referring to the need for social relatedness in Self-Determination-Theory (SDT) and how this translates to the design of embodied agents’ characters, the collaborations they afford and the partnerships they establish over time. In co-creative ideation sessions with stroke survivors, this potential was explored, resulting in an interactive prototype of ‘Edo the Coach’, i.e. an embodied agent for home-based upper extremity stroke rehabilitation that was evaluated by stroke survivors in their home contexts. Based on the insights gained, we reflect on the potential of using SDT for designing embodied agents that foster motivational relationships between patient and agent as an answer to the growing demand for eHealth-supported self-care within an increasingly digitized healthcare context.

Ethics toolkits, checklists and workshops are intended to help integrate ethical considerations into the design of data-driven systems. Yet little is known about what long-term effect such integrations might have. We conducted an ethnographic investigation of the adoption of an internal ethical toolkit in a major European city organization. We find that neither toolkit designers nor organizations that implement these, pay attention to the affective experience and emotional costs of integrating ethics toolkits into technology design team workflows. We demonstrate how moral awareness, while necessary for moral technical practice, also leads to unaccounted moral stress for practitioners.

Sensor networks are increasingly commonplace in visions of smart cities and future healthcare systems, promising greater efficiency and increased wellbeing. However, the design of these technologies remains focused on specific users and fragmented by context, overlooking the diversity of needs, wants and values present when technologies, people, and lived realities interact within instrumented spaces. In this paper we present a workshop method – Sensing Care – that can help researchers, interdisciplinary design and development teams, and potentially affected users, to explore what it takes to design for living with sensor technologies that intersect and interact across private and public spaces, through speculative scenarios and role play. Drawing from three deployments of the workshop, we discuss how this approach supports the design of future care-oriented sensor networks, and helps designers understand what it means to live with complex technologies as people traverse diverse contexts.

Smart wearables are increasingly used to help people deal with stress. Still, a less explored area of research in this field concerns the partnerships that smart wearables can take on when engaging people in stress-coping activities. To facilitate further understanding of the human-wearable partnerships, we designed Grippy, a smart wearable system composed of a physical glove and a smartphone application to help the wearer actively explore and cope with stress in daily situations. We introduced Grippy, as a speculative probe, to six participants (four master students and two university employees) who wore it for five successive days. Participants were interviewed about their use experience of Grippy during and after these five days. Qualitative data collected from the interviews was interpreted regarding how Grippy could fit into people’s stress-coping activities across different daily contexts and what kinds of partnerships with the smart wearable were perceived by the participants. In addition, we reflect on the design issues that led to the mismatch between our design intentions and people’s actual use experiences. We discuss how these results have deepened our understanding of human-wearable partnerships in the context of stress management and the usability issues that might hinder the expression and acceptance of smart wearables designed as partners. We end the discussion by reflecting on the implications of smart wearables as partners in mental healthcare.

Purpose: It is important to support families in dealing with the distress that comes along with the diagnosis and treatment of childhood cancer. Therefore, we developed a playful tool that families can use at home to support their family functioning and safeguard their normal family life. We pilot tested this new tool called Mr.V and describe how families used and evaluated the tool, and how it could be further improved. Methods: Mr.V is an interactive dispenser that looks like a spaceman and proposes family activities. These activities are suggested by family members themselves and dispensed by the machine at unexpected moments. Mr.V produced data on how it was used, and a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were used to evaluate the experiences of families and the potential of this tool. Results: Ten families with a child with cancer between 5 and 9 years old (M_age = 6.7 years) who were in active treatment (mixed diagnoses) participated (n = 47; n_patients = 10, n_siblings = 9, n_parents = 16). All families used Mr.V for multiple days and were very satisfied with the tool regarding its acceptability, feasibility, and potential effectiveness. They also had suggestions on how the tool could be further improved. Conclusion: Mr.V is an acceptable and feasible tool that can be implemented by families independently at home, regardless of their level of need for support. Mr.V promoted family activities and therefore has the potential to support family functioning and normal family life at home. Future research should further investigate the effectiveness of this tool.

Since its introduction, Research through Design (RtD) has taken on a wide variety of forms. Currently, there is a lack of clarity about what connects and separates different RtD approaches. Several attempts have been made to clarify these matters, often in the form of a top-down categorization. Here we start on a different path, one that is open for different points of view and grounded in the ongoing concerns and needs of RtD practitioners. Over a two-month period, we engaged a local research community in weekly discussions about RtD in their work. Thoughts and questions were posted on a dedicated wall-space, maintained, and clustered over the weeks. As a result, we identified 11 themes that indicate concerns among participants about RtD. We suggest the themes can help in articulating different RtD ‘styles’ and ‘genres’, and believe this should be a collaborative and bottom-up effort that crosses disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

Stress is an important aspect of mental health which impacts on wellbeing. Wearable devices are increasingly used to help people deal with stress in daily life. However, most of the current applications focus on detecting and representing physiological data. In this paper we report on the design of an integrated wearable system composed of physiological sensors and a self-reporting interface. Through an iterative design process, we developed two prototypes and evaluated their technical performance in a laboratory condition. We elaborate on the issues we have encountered and addressed in the design iterations. We discuss how these lessons might contribute to the design of integrated sensing systems in real life. We end this paper by reviewing limitations of the study and directions for future work.Keywords: smart wearables, stress management, design for mental health