Towards the Design and Development of Future Robotic Products and Systems

Summary form only given. This talk will focus on design as a means to discover and understand the how to best design future robotic products. One important consideration is how to understand the human experience of use of these systems. Robotic products are a class of social products, artifacts, services, and systems that have social meaning and implications for people´s social behavior and relationships. In this talk, I will begin with historic examples of products that inspired surprising and unintended social behaviors. I will then focus on robotic products specifically, showing how our research seeks to understand how simple social attributes in robotic products and systems makes them easier to adopt and less stigmatizing. In specific, I will discuss a set of particular design cues - gaze, motion, and speech and sound, and the concept of personality derived collectively from these primitives - discuss how alone and in combination, they might foster the adoption and use of robotic products and systems.