| Beschreibung |
In industrial settings, robots already work alongside humans, but in highly specialized settings and routine tasks. Increasingly, robots are moving into our personal space. Examples are care robots in nursing homes (Paro [4]), cleaning and assistive robots in our houses (Roomba [5]) or robots that support childcare (Milo [2]). HCI thus increasingly addresses Human Robot Interaction (HRI). Questions include issues of trust of robots, e.g. whether we might keep their secrets [1] or of interacting with or through robots (e.g. [3]). Nonetheless, most studies are undertaken in the lab; few studies currently explore what it might feel like to share personal space with another entity, how people might respond to it, and therefore which possibilities might arise for design.
In this project you will choose and apply methods that explore how it might be like to live with another entity which has partly autonomous behaviour. The focus is not on the development of robots, but on creative exploration of the design space. Methods could include:
· Speculative Design: Building artefacts that are not necessarily functional, but tell a story through which we can ask questions about emerging technologies before they even exist. How could speculation be useful in the field of robotics beyond the (mostly dystopian or utopian) examples of sci-fi movies, but rather in an embodied, everyday situation?
· Technology Probes: What might it be like to live with a robot? What better way to find out than deploying a prototype in someone’s home? Probes are design artefacts that live in people’s houses for a while, to explore how they might affect people’s life and how they are conceptualized. Using this approach, you could consider various form factors or means of interacting and focus on means to build and test those.
The project is highly open and exploratory but it is expected that it will lead to a (conceptual) prototype in addition to the study results. In this project, you will get hands-on insights into creative research and ideation methods, working in an exciting fast-moving technology field. You will further engage critically with existing technologies and future visions by considering their mundane consequences as well as their wider societal consequences.
Bibliography
[1] Peter H. Kahn, Takayuki Kanda, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Brian T. Gill, Solace Shen, Heather E. Gary, and Jolina H. Ruckert. 2015. Will People Keep the Secret of a Humanoid Robot?: Psychological Intimacy in HRI. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction - HRI ’15, ACM Press, Portland, Oregon, USA, 173–180. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2696454.2696486
[2] RoboKind LLC. Meet Milo! | Robots4Autism. Retrieved January 16, 2020 from https://www.robokind.com/robots4autism/meet-milo
[3] Michal Luria, Guy Hoffman, and Oren Zuckerman. 2017. Comparing Social Robot, Screen and Voice Interfaces for Smart-Home Control. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’17, ACM Press, Denver, Colorado, USA, 580–628. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025786
[4] PARO Therapeutic Robot. Retrieved January 16, 2020 from http://www.parorobots.com/index.asp
[5] Roomba Saugroboter | iRobot. Retrieved January 16, 2020 from https://www.irobot.de/roomba |
| Voraussetzungen |
Participants should have basic knowledge or experience of user-centered methods (user studies, interviewing etc.) and ideally some experience in prototyping techniques. Depending on the students’ interests, working with micro-controllers such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or basic robotic kits might be an option and support will be given if needed. In addition, all participants should enjoy working in an interdisciplinary team, want to be creative and be able to converse in English. |
