Designing Sound for Social Robots: Advancing Professional Practice through Design Principles

Sound is one of the core modalities social robots can use to communicate with the humans around them in rich, engaging, and effective ways. While a robot's auditory communication happens predominantly through speech, a growing body of work demonstrates the various ways non-verbal robot sound can affect humans, and researchers have begun to formulate design recommendations that encourage using the medium to its full potential. However, formal strategies for successful robot sound design have so far not emerged, current frameworks and principles are largely untested and no effort has been made to survey creative robot sound design practice. In this dissertation, I combine creative practice, expert interviews, and human-robot interaction studies to advance our understanding of how designers can best ideate, create, and implement robot sound. In a first step, I map out a design space that combines established sound design frameworks with insights from interviews with robot sound design experts. I then systematically traverse this space across three robot sound design explorations, investigating (i) the effect of artificial movement sound on how robots are perceived, (ii) the benefits of applying compositional theory to robot sound design, and (iii) the role and potential of spatially distributed robot sound. Finally, I implement the designs from prior chapters into humanoid robot Diamandini, and deploy it as a case study. Based on a synthesis of the data collection and design practice conducted across the thesis, I argue that the creation of robot sound is best guided by four design perspectives: fiction (sound as a means to convey a narrative), composition (sound as its own separate listening experience), plasticity (sound as something that can vary and adapt over time), and space (spatial distribution of sound as a separate communication channel). The conclusion of the thesis presents these four perspectives and proposes eleven design principles across them which are supported by detailed examples. This work contributes an extensive body of design principles, process models, and techniques providing researchers and designers with new tools to enrich the way robots communicate with humans

What do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About Human-Robot Interaction?

This is a collection of papers presented at the workshop What Do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About HRI , held at the 2010 Human-Robot Interaction Conference, in Osaka, Japan

From Everyday Information Behaviours to Clickable Solidarity

Digital social media has, in many ways, transformed the way people create, maintain, and sustain their social information networks, and has also influenced their information-related behaviours such as searching, seeking, finding and use of information. This is especially true in technologically-mediated environments. In many ways, social media is the contemporary incarnation of the Internet itself. It is a complex information-and-communication environment, very much analogous to physical environments, but consisting of symbolic matter rather than physical matter. All social situations are information environments and social media is no different. This paper is an inter-disciplinary literature-review essay that examines the social media phenomenon using the lens of selected theories in information science and allied disciplines such as communication and media ecology with a specific focus toward its possible role in civil society using the conceptual framework of spatial metaphors drawn from the study of traditional physical environments. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ccs.v5i3.348

Mental State Attribution to Robots: A Systematic Review of Conceptions, Methods, and Findings

The topic of mental state attribution to robots has been approached by researchers from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy. As a consequence, the empirical studies that have been conducted so far exhibit considerable diversity in terms of how the phenomenon is described and how it is approached from a theoretical and methodological standpoint. This literature review addresses the need for a shared scientific understanding of mental state attribution to robots by systematically and comprehensively collating conceptions, methods, and findings from 155 empirical studies across multiple disciplines. The findings of the review include that: (1) the terminology used to describe mental state attribution to robots is diverse but largely homogenous in usage; (2) the tendency to attribute mental states to robots is determined by factors such as the age and motivation of the human as well as the behavior, appearance, and identity of the robot; (3) there is a computer < robot < human pattern in the tendency to attribute mental states that appears to be moderated by the presence of socially interactive behavior; (4) there are conflicting findings in the empirical literature that stem from different sources of evidence, including self-report and non-verbal behavioral or neurological data. The review contributes toward more cumulative research on the topic and opens up for a transdisciplinary discussion about the nature of the phenomenon and what types of research methods are appropriate for investigation

The Machine as Art/ The Machine as Artist

The articles collected in this volume from the two companion Arts Special Issues, “The Machine as Art (in the 20th Century)” and “The Machine as Artist (in the 21st Century)”, represent a unique scholarly resource: analyses by artists, scientists, and engineers, as well as art historians, covering not only the current (and astounding) rapprochement between art and technology but also the vital post-World War II period that has led up to it; this collection is also distinguished by several of the contributors being prominent individuals within their own fields, or as artists who have actually participated in the still unfolding events with which it is concerne

Mediated rhythms of bodies in coordination: design of communication technology for connectedness

Due to social distancing restrictions caused by COVID-19, people worldwide have relied on communication technology for staying connected with their loved ones. Despite many benefits, these technologies are inadequate substitutes for the feeling of connectedness that is experienced during face-to-face interaction. In this thesis, informed by enactivism and embodiment theory, I argue that to design for connectedness we must stop reducing human communication to the information-transmission paradigm used in computer-mediated communication (CMC). While the notion of embodiment has been widely accepted by human-computer interaction (HCI) practitioners, the idea that human communication takes place through sending/receiving and encoding/decoding information has not yet been explicitly challenged. I have designed Undula, an experimental interface to explore the communicative potential of physical movement, in this case the movement afforded by a rocking chair (teaser available at https://vimeo.com/365451168). The interface consists of two large-scale custom-made rocking chairs. The rocking movement of each chair is sonified, allowing a pair of participants to communicate over distance via a co-created rhythmic soundscape. The interface was tested and evaluated in controlled environments over three stages in both immediate (same room) and distant (separate rooms) settings. This practice-based design exploration contributes to knowledge in several ways: - It focuses on the ethereal concept of mediated connectedness, which has not previously been explicitly defined within HCI research. - It proposes a conceptual shift from communication technology for information processing to communication technology for dynamic embodied expression. In doing it compares the conceptual understanding of these two schemes as situated respectively within the 2nd (interaction as information exchange) and 3rd (phenomenologically situated and embodied interactions) HCI paradigms. - It discusses design approaches for facilitating intersubjective dynamic interactions and affective engagements through movement coordination; these are not instructed or gamified but are implicitly facilitated through the interface design of a rocking chair device. - It updates previous studies by testing whether bidirectional coordinated movement can facilitate mutual feelings of connectedness between pairs of people over distance, without visual feedback or other external stimuli to aid synchronisation