Users can provide valuable insights for designing new technologies like social robots, with the right tools and methodologies. Challenges in inviting users as co-designers of social robots is due to lack of guidelines or methodologies to (1) organize co-design processes and/or (2) engage with people long-term to develop technologies together. The main contribution of this work is to provide guidelines for longterm co-design for how other researchers can adopt longterm co-design, informed by a 12-month co-design with older adults designing a social social robot. We leveraged humancentered, tactile and experiential design activities, including participatory design, based upon the following design principles: scenario specific exploration, long-term lived experiences, supporting multiple design activities, cultivating relationships, and employing divergent and convergent processes. We present seven different sessions across three stages as examples of this methodology that build on each other to engage users as codesigners, successfully deployed in a co-design project of home social robots with 28 older adults. Lastly, we detail 10 longterm divergent-convergent co-design guidelines for designing social robots. We demonstrate the value of leveraging people's lived technology experiences and co-design activities to generate actionable social robot design guidelines, advocating for more applications of the methodology in broader contexts as well.
The word "robot" frequently conjures unrealistic expectations of utilitarian perfection: tireless, efficient, and flawless agents. However, real-world robots are far from perfect-they fail and make mistakes. Thus, roboticists should consider altering their current assumptions and cultivating new perspectives that account for a more complete range of robot roles, behaviors, and interactions. To encourage this, we explore the use of metaphors for generating novel ideas and reframing existing problems, eliciting new perspectives of human-robot interaction. Our work makes two contributions. We (1) surface current assumptions that accompany the term "robots," and (2) present a collection of alternative perspectives of interaction with robots through metaphors. By identifying assumptions, we provide a comprehensible list of aspects to reconsider regarding robots' physicality, roles, and behaviors. Through metaphors, we propose new ways of examining how we can use, relate to, and co-exist with the robots that will share our future.
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