Description of activities planned

Morning session with presentations of position papers and afternoon session with group discussions on themes extracted from the position paper presentations. Discussions will be encouraged on theoretical and methodological aspects of physical and embodied interaction, e.g.:

• Methods that specifically address the design of physical interaction
• User-centred design of robotic products, how and why?
• Studies of interaction with moving physical artefacts
• Potential areas for novel robotic services or products
• How robotic movement and behaviour affect interaction and experience
• How physical appearance of technology affects interaction and experience
• The role of anthropomorphism why it might be important for design
• Social and spontaneous action around or with robots

The workshop will end with group work presentations and discussion of potential developments that are found especially relevant. The exact structure for presentations and group activities will be set nearer to the date of the workshop.

Outcome of the workshop

Primarily, through contributions from a diverse range of participants, the aim of this workshop is to open up a space for taking robot design seriously in HCI. As we have noted, we will encourage participants to reflect on where recent developments in HCI intersect with HRI and how such intersections might lead to new research possibilities. An additional goal is to further cement the community of researchers undertaking related work on robotics and everyday life.

More practically, the workshop should provide an understanding of a selection of methods and techniques that can be used to design robots and other actuated physical interactive artefacts from a user-centred or experience-centred perspective. This includes approaches of participatory design, industrial design, as well as existing technical approaches to robot design.