Nurture Robotic Things
Speculating Future of Human Robot Interaction through Creative Designs with Everyday Objects
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What can robots learn from the things we already formed deep relation?
What can robots learn from the things we already formed deep relation?
This workshop starts from a simple observation: we already have deep, complex, evolving relationships with everyday objects. We form deep, layered relationships with everyday objects — through repetition, through bodily memory, through the stories we pour into them. Yet when we design robots — especially those intended to provide care, companionship, or emotional support — we rarely draw on this rich history of human-object intimacy. Instead, we tend to model robot relationships on human-human interaction, or on the logic of smart devices that are "intelligent from day one."
A weathered coffee mug bearing cracks from decades of morning rituals, or a child’s stuffed animal imprinted with generations of family stories, exemplify how static objects dynamically participate in human lives.
We believe something important gets lost in that translation. The relationships people form with their most cherished objects are characterized by qualities that current robotic design struggles to accommodate.
Workshop Goals
This workshop explores how creatively robotizing everyday objects can challenge anthropocentric paradigms in HRI and inspire new long-term relational models. Through hands-on prototyping, design fiction, and reflection, participants will investigate how personal attachments to mundane objects might inspire richer, evolving relationships with robotic things.
Designing robotic things and reimaging the relationship of human and robots through the nurturing process, is not simply a matter of adding sensors and intelligence to everyday objects. It raises a set of intertwined challenges and design tensions:
- Temporality of relationships - how do you start, change and end the relationship with robotic things?
- Designing for growth - what robotic qualities and interactions can be considered for designing the relationship change?
- Agency in relationship - How do we navigate the space between a passive container for human meaning and an active agent that might enrich — or rupture — the relationship？
Read more in our workshop proposal
Schedule
Schedule
09:00-09:30 Welcome and Introduction to the Workshop and Icebreakers
09:30-10:00 Interactive Exploration of Relational Robotic Demonstrations
10:00-10:45 Object Autobiography Sharing
10:45-11:30 Reflecting on Bonds with Everyday Objects
11:30-13:00 Social session and Lunch Break
13:00-13:45 Brainstorming Interaction Design
13:45-15:15 Rapid Prototyping
15:15-16:00 Speculating and Enacting Temporal Design Fictions
16:00-16:20 Final Showcase and Reflection
Organisers
Organisers
Yanheng (Lydia) Li is a Ph.D candidate in Studio for Narrative Spaces at City University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on designing expressive robots, and examines how these robots can foster positive relationships between individuals and their social and environmental surroundings.
Xiaoqing Sun is a Ph.D candidate from Beijing Institute of Technology and Shanghai Innovation Insitute. Her research explores how non-anthropocentric perspectives can facilitate meaningful human-animal and human-robot interactions.
Mingyang Xu is a Ph.D candidate from Keio University. His work explores how embodied robotic interfaces, particularly soft floating robot, can enrich close-proximity and intimate interactions, with expertise in developing and demonstrating robotic interfaces.
Zhen Yin is a professor at Tongji University and Shanghai Innovation Institute. His research focuses on bio-inspired robotics and physical intelligence, with an emphasize on environment adaptive robotic systems based on synergerized discrete elements. He has developed various types of bio-inspired robotic modules that offer functions including but not limited to impact protection, multi-modal sensing, flexible actuation and multi-modal locomotion.
Xipei Ren is an Associate Professor at University of Macau. He worked as a Data Scientist at HumanTotalCare and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he received his PhD degree in Industrial Design. His design research projects have been exhibited in several globally recognised design events, including the Dutch Design Week and the World Design Capital Expo.
RAY LC is Assistant Professor of Creative Media at Studio for Narrative Spaces, City University of Hong Kong. RAY LC’s practice explores how humans adapt to constraints to foster creativity, examining their expression in co-creation with AI and machines. He uses human-computer interaction and speculative narrative approaches in large scale robotics and immersive media to probe the ways humans and social communities are affected by emergent technologies.
For enquiries contact Yanheng Li (yanhengli3-c@my.cityu.edu.hk) or Xiaoqing Sun (x.sun@bit.edu.cn)
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