Meaningful Futures with Robots: Designing a New Coexistence

Soon, robots will leave the factories and make their way into living rooms, supermarkets, and care facilities. They will cooperate with humans in everyday life, taking on more than just practical tasks. How should they communicate with us? Do they need eyes, a screen, or arms? Should they resemble humans? Or may they enrich social situations precisely because they act so differently from humans?

Meaningful Futures with Robots: Designing a New Coexistence provides insight into the opportunities and risks that arise from living with robots in the future, anchored in current research projects on everyday robotics. As well as generating ideas for robot developers and designers, it also critically discusses existing theories and methods for social robotics from different perspectives - ethical, design, artistical and technological - and presents new approaches to meaningful human-robot interaction design.

Key Features:

• Provides insights into current research on robots from different disciplinary angles with a particular focus on a value-driven design.
• Includes contributions from designers, psychologists, engineers, philosophers, artists, and legal scholars, among others.

Licence line: Chapters 1, 3, 12, and 15 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.crcpress.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Dr. Judith Dörrenbächer is a design researcher at the chair for "Ubiquitous Design / Experience and Interaction" at the University of Siegen. Educated in design, her current focus is on performative methods in design, on theories about animism transferred to HCI and design (techno-animism) and on interaction and design strategies of social robots.

Ronda Ringfort-Felner is a research assistant at the chair for "Ubiquitous Design / Experience and Interaction" at the University of Siegen. With a background in design and HCI, her research focuses on design fiction, the design and exploration of future intelligent autonomous systems such as social robots, and the exploration of the related societal and social implications.

Robin Neuhaus is a research assistant at the chair for "Ubiquitous Design / Experience and Interaction" at the University of Siegen. With a background in industrial design and HCI, his current research focuses on the design of experiences and interactions with robots, voice assistants and other non-human actors.

Dr. Marc Hassenzahl is Professor for "Ubiquitous Design / Experience and Interaction" at the University of Siegen. He combines his training in psychology with a love for interaction design. With his group of designers and psychologists, he explores the theory and practice of designing pleasurable, meaningful and transforming interactive technologies.