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.

A line of research in HCI and HRI has started to consider robot failures, errors, and breakdowns not as problems to be eliminated, but as opportunities to inform and enrich design. This shift has led to growing interest in how robotic fallibility affects user trust, interaction quality, and system acceptance. In this paper, we inquire into what it means to design with fallibility. Drawing on feminist technoscience, we examine how current approaches frame the roles of designers and users (agency), how research methods shape the phenomena they study (performativity), and how underlying research goals carry ethical and epistemological implications (motivation). In recognizing robotic fallibility as a sociotechnical phenomenon and design research as a world-making practice, we provide design considerations that promote more reflexive, inclusive, and politically aware engagements with (robot) failure in HRI and HCI.

Smart home technologies embed values such as sustainability, comfort, privacy, and security, which can sometimes conflict with one another, considering the complexities of domestic environments. This paper investigates the potential implications of these value conflicts and the corresponding design challenges. Through an enactment session and co-speculations with professional actors, we explored what it means to navigate multiple values simultaneously, live with products that impose their own values, and manage value conflicts both with and among smart products. The findings challenge the seamless and harmonious vision of smart homes conceived by technologists, proposing shifts in the common narrative: from value alignment to value transparency, from service provision to mutual care, and from autonomy to responsiveness. We discuss that acknowledging value conflicts, rather than eliminating them, is an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of users and home environments and guide the design of smart home technologies.

This is a critique of how designers deal with temporality in design to speculate about socio-technical futures. The paper unpacks how embedded definitions and assumptions of temporality in current design tools contribute to coloniality in designed futures. Based on this critique, we reject the notion that it is only AI that needs fixing, as design practice becomes implicated in how oppression extends from physical systems to global digital platforms. To make these issues visible, we dissect the Futures Cone model used in speculative design. As an alternative, the paper then presents hauntology as a vocabulary that can aid designers in accommodating pluriversal histories in anticipatory futures and reorienting their speculative tools. To illustrate the benefits of the proposed metaphors, the paper highlights examples of coloniality in digital spaces and emphasizes the failure of speculative design to decolonize future imaginaries. Using points of reference from hauntology, ones that engage with states of lingering or spectrality, and notions of nostalgia, absence, and anticipation, the paper contributes to rethinking the role that design tools play in colonizing future imaginaries, especially those pertaining to potentially disruptive technologies.

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.

We propose a workshop stemming from ongoing conversations about the role of design methods and designed artefacts within the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Given the growing interest in understanding what the field can learn from design explorations, the workshop focuses on hands-on annotating activity where participants (researchers and practitioners from HRI, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design Research) will analyze and reflect upon selected collections of robotic artefacts. Ultimate goal of the workshop is to explicate values, concepts and perspectives that usually remain tacitly embedded in the designed artefacts and, as such, hard to appreciate as proper HRI contributions. The expected outcome of the workshop is a set of methodological recommendations and concrete examples of what kind of knowledge can be generated through robotic artefacts.

The last decade has witnessed the expansion of design space to include the epistemologies and methodologies of more-than-human design (MTHD). Design researchers and practitioners have been increasingly studying, designing for, and designing with nonhumans. This panel will bring together HCI experts who work on MTHD with different nonhumans as their subjects. Panelists will engage the audience through discussion of their shared and diverging visions, perspectives, and experiences, and through suggestions for opportunities and challenges for the future of MTHD. The panel will provoke the audience into reflecting on how the emergence of MTHD signals a paradigm shift in HCI and human-centered design, what benefits this shift might bring and whether MTH should become the mainstream approach, as well as how to involve nonhumans in design and research.

With the advancements in AI, agents (i.e., smart products, robots, software agents) are increasingly capable of working closely together with humans in a variety of ways while benefiting from each other. These human-agent collaborations have gained growing attention in the HCI community; however, the field lacks clear guidelines on how to design the agents' behaviors in collaborations. In this paper, the qualities that are relevant for designers to create robust and pleasant human-agent collaborations were investigated. Bratman's Shared Cooperative Activity framework was used to identify the core characteristics of collaborations and survey the most important issues in the design of human-agent collaborations, namely code-of-conduct, task delegation, autonomy and control, intelligibility, common ground, offering help and requesting help. The aim of this work is to add structure to this growing and important facet of HCI research and operationalize the concept of human-agent collaboration with concrete design considerations.

Interest in design methods and tools has been steadily growing in HRI. Yet, design is not acknowledged as a discipline with specific epistemology and methodology. Designerly HRI work is validated through user studies which, we argue, provide a limited account of the knowledge design produces. This paper aims to broaden current understanding of designerly HRI work and its contributions by unpacking what designerly knowledge is and how to produce it. Through a critical analysis of current HRI design literature, we identify a lack of work dedicated to understanding the conceptual implications of robotic artifacts. These, in fact, are implicit carriers of crucial HRI knowledge that can challenge established assumptions about how a robot should look, act, and be like. We conclude by discussing a set of practices desirable to legitimize designerly HRI work, and calling for further research addressing the conceptual implications designerly HRI work.

This paper is a methodological replication of Barendregt et al. [11], who urged Child-Computer Interaction field to embrace Intermediate Level Knowledge as a meaningful and valid way of generating knowledge. We extend this epistemological gap to the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Currently, artefact-centered papers - papers that present the development of an artefact - seem to be one of the primary ways that the HRI field generates knowledge. In this paper, we made an analysis of all papers presented at the HRI Conference from 2006 to 2020. Our results indicate that the 41,2 % of the papers were artefact-centered; and the impact of them, measured in the number of citations, was significantly lower than other kinds of papers. We used 23 artefact-centered papers to formulate two strong concepts and investigate how the foundational design epistemology about intermediate-level knowledge and RtD can contribute to other design-related disciplines to produce useful and valuable knowledge.