Call For PAPERS

Do futuring activities play into your forward-looking projects in HRI?
Do the organisations you work with have a framework to engage with strategies for their future (e.g., McKinsey’s 3 horizons)?
How does the organisation’s vision/strategy manifest in
- the companies operations (at different timescales)
- how workers see their personal, professional, and societal futures
How might your research, design, and development activities with workers support HRI as a sustainable empowering societal force?

In the context of our workshop, we are especially interested in how front line workers understand their role, agency and aspirations around their personal and work futures.

INTRODUCTION

Dear colleagues,

Following on the success of the previous two workshops, the Third International Workshop on Worker-Robot Relations: Futuring Worker Empowerment through Worldbuilding around Human-Robot Interactions is coming up. You are welcome to participate with or without a submission if you are going to HRI. Moreover, you can attend the workshop without having to sign up for the whole conference. Follow this link to register: HRI 2026 registration

TARGET AUDIENCE AND TOPICS

In this third WRR workshop, we focus on how worldbuilding activities with workers can add to our transdisciplinary research and innovation toolkit, in synergy with the empowering society theme of this conference. We want to learn together how to enact sustainable system-level change in work futures with and for workers, and how to leverage the HRI community towards that goal. We aim to engage participants from both inside and outside academic institutions (see our organisers and speakers in our previous 2 workshops). While aspiring to direct meaningful conversations with workers, managers and other practitioners, we also recognize the constraints on enacting such conversations in the context of this conference setting (admission costs, time off work, location, etc. are just a few of the challenges we faced in previous years) We therefore aim to report, imagine and speculate on such conversations in your papers, our case studies and in the hands-on activities. We welcome ideas/suggestions/discussions on how to enact such a conversation in future workshops.

SUBMISSION INFO

Participants are encouraged to submit one-to-four page poster papers relating to any case studies of future-oriented worker empowerment within their organisations— whether positive, negative, or speculative.