Chapter 15 Empathizing with Robots

Typically, social robots are supposed to empathize with humans, understand human emotions, and anticipate human needs. With this chapter, the authors turn the table: What can humans learn through empathizing with technology? How might the design of robots change if developers adopted the perspective of a robot, walking in its shoes to perceive and understand the world from its point of view through sensors and actuators? Is the technomorphization of human bodies a mind-expanding complement to the anthropomorphization of technology? The authors present a range of innovative methods, all of which are based on empathy, for use by robot designers. For example, Thing Ethnography works by attaching cameras to access the perspective of an object. Object Personas is about imagining the personality of an object. When applying Enacting Utopia, designers perform like an object in a positive future. Through with Techno-Mimesis, they are able to perceive a use scenario as an object does. The authors clarify that such kinds of empathy do not happen out of naïveté (Old Animism). When applied consciously, they generate knowledge about—and reflexive distance from—technological objects such as robots

Chapter 15 Empathizing with Robots

Typically, social robots are supposed to empathize with humans, understand human emotions, and anticipate human needs. With this chapter, the authors turn the table: What can humans learn through empathizing with technology? How might the design of robots change if developers adopted the perspective of a robot, walking in its shoes to perceive and understand the world from its point of view through sensors and actuators? Is the technomorphization of human bodies a mind-expanding complement to the anthropomorphization of technology? The authors present a range of innovative methods, all of which are based on empathy, for use by robot designers. For example, Thing Ethnography works by attaching cameras to access the perspective of an object. Object Personas is about imagining the personality of an object. When applying Enacting Utopia, designers perform like an object in a positive future. Through with Techno-Mimesis, they are able to perceive a use scenario as an object does. The authors clarify that such kinds of empathy do not happen out of naïveté (Old Animism). When applied consciously, they generate knowledge about—and reflexive distance from—technological objects such as robots

Positive Work Practices. Opportunities and Challenges in Designing Meaningful Work-related Technology

Work is a rich source of meaning. However, beyond organizational changes, most approaches in the research field of Meaningful Work neglected the power of work-related technology to increase meaning. Using two cases as examples, this paper proposes a wellbeing-driven approach to the design of work-related technology. Despite the positive results of our cases, we argue that the use of technology as a means of increasing meaning in the workplace is still in its infancy.Comment: 5 pages, to be published in Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System

Understanding and Designing Automation with Peoples' Wellbeing in Mind

Nowadays, automation not only dominates industry but becomes more and more a part of our private, everyday lives. Following the notion of increased convenience and more time for the "important things in life", automation relieves us from many daily household chores - robots vacuum floors and automated coffeemakers produce supposedly barista-quality coffee on the press of a button. In many cases these offers are embraced by people without further questioning. Of course, automation frees us from many unloved activities, but we may also lose something by delegating more and more everyday activities to automation. In a series of four studies, we explored the experiential costs of everyday automation and strategies of how to design technology to reconcile experience with the advantages of ever more powerful automation.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

08292 Abstracts Collection -- The Study of Visual Aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction

From 13.07. to 16.07.2008, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08292 ``The Study of Visual Aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available