Demo Hour

DEMO HOUR: Social robotic donuts

In order to broaden the design space for social robot design, we created two air-actuated donut-shaped social robots: a small uniform silicone version and a more organic latex version. Our intent was to move away from typical human or animal form mimicry, focusing instead on elastic expression, ambiguous form, and playful behaviors. Early studies show the robots provoking curious relationships with these contestational objects, inviting new forms of intriguing communication and interaction.

Boer, L. and Bewley, H. Reconfiguring the appearance and expression of social robots by acknowledging their otherness. Proc. of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference. ACM, New York, 2018, 667–677; https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196743

Bewley, H and Boer, L. Designing Blo-nut: Design principles, choreography and otherness in an expressive social robot. Proc. of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference. ACM, New York, 2018, 1069–1080; https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196817

https://ixdlab.itu.dk/

Harvey Bewley and Laurens Boer, IxD Lab, IT University Copenhagen
[email protected]

Hardware and software setup for programming the elastic expressions of the robotic donuts.

Participants exploring possible interactions with a silicon robotic donut.