“Designerly” Human-Robot Interaction
2019 - present
In the past decades, the understanding of design and its epistemology have gone through an evolutionary broadening. The field has acknowledged that the design knowledge resides beyond the artifact and the act of creating an artifact is in itself a potential generator of knowledge. The approach and methodologies of “research through design” (Gaver, 2012; Stappers & Giaccardi, nd; Zimmerman & Forlizzi, 2014) “constructive design research” (Koskinen et al., 2011) or “critical theory” (Bardzell et al.. 2012) were established as valid and valuable means for “designerly ways of knowing”.
In this project, we—Maria Luce Lupetti (TU Delft), Cristina Zaga (U Twente), and myself—advocate that the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is in need of such a broadening. We collaborate to define what HRI design epistemology is and could be, and how to evaluate the knowledge produced by design practices in HRI. Understanding the conceptual implications of research artifacts and how they complement existing knowledge is crucial for the development of disciplines where design is a core component. Through a critical analysis of the current HRI design work, 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 aim to define a set of practices desirable to legitimize designerly HRI work and call for further research addressing the conceptual implications designerly HRI work.
Related Publications:
Cila, N., González González, I., Jacobs, J., & Rozendaal, M. (2024, March). Bridging HRI Theory and Practice: Design Guidelines for Robot Communication in Dairy Farming. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 137-146). doi: 10.1145/3610977.3634991
Lupetti, M. L., Zaga, C., Cila, N., Luria, M., Hoggenmüller, M. & Jung, M. F. (2022). 2nd International Workshop on Designerly HRI Knowledge. Reflecting on HRI practices through Annotated Portfolios of Robotic Artefacts. In 2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Sapporo, Japan, 2022, pp. 1269-1271, doi: 10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889569.
Cila, N., Zaga, C. & Lupetti., M. (2021). Learning from robotic artefacts: A quest for strong concepts in Human-Robot Interaction. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, (pp. 1356–1365). DOI: https://doi-org.tudelft.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/3461778.3462095
Lupetti, M., Zaga, C. & Cila, N. (2021). Designerly Ways of Knowing in HRI: Broadening the Scope of Design-oriented HRI Through the Concept of Intermediate-level Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, (pp. 389–398). DOI: https://doi-org.tudelft.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/3434073.3444668
Lupetti, M., Zaga, C. & Cila, N. (2020). Designerly HRI knowledge: Bridging HRI and Design Research. In Proceedings of the 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).