Frontier stage
Keynote

How to design robots we want to live with

In person
  • Date
    10 July 2025
    Timeframe
    09:30 - 09:40 CEST
    Duration
    10 minutes
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    Although robotics has achieved significant technical advancement, we have yet to see broader adoption of robots in society.  Technical development alone is not sufficient to create robots for broad everyday use. Rather, robot design must incorporate an understanding of people’s social relationships, values, and sense-making to improve the societal fit of robots. Our  studies of user communities in Japan show how social as well as technical infrastructure supports continued personal robot use and helps people build emotional and social connections with robots. In co-design studies with older adults, children, and their care partners, furthermore, we see that users make sense of robots in relational ways, in the context of their existing social relationships and through negotiation with other actors in the context of use. This suggests that we must consider a broader social agenda for robot design, which includes not just the features of the robots themselves, but the design of affordances for supporting and mediating human relationships with and around robots. This can help us create human-robot interactions that people find meaningful and sustainable.