What is it about?
We apply the idea of "design metaphors", or associations of an object with similar ideas, to robot designs. We developed a dataset of 165 different robots and the metaphors people describe the robots with. We collect how people expect the robots to behave functionally and socially. We find that the metaphors people use to describe the different robots are highly related to how they expect the robot to behave. This is useful for robot designers and study designers that want their robots to meet expectations, rather than underperform or overperform.
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Photo by essam mrzk on Unsplash
Why is it important?
When robots do not meet user expectations, their adoption is hindered. To develop effective interactions, researchers need to understand how users form mental models of robots. Using our dataset, researchers can make informed decisions about a robot's design for an intended use-case so the expectations user have of the robot is aligned with what it is capable of doing.
Perspectives
This article was a great effort to see how people understand robots. Using these metaphors can help designers create robots that have never been seen before doing tasks that might aid people in ways that have not yet been imagined. The interactive visualizations on our website are also an exciting tool for laypeople to use to understand what robots exist and what people think of them.
Nathaniel Dennler
University of Southern California
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Design Metaphors for Understanding User Expectations of Socially Interactive Robot Embodiments, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, April 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3550489.
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