In designing for dementia, the concept of person-centered care (PCC) effectively shifts attention away from deficit orientations. However, it predominantly focuses on the roles of humans in sustaining personhood, leaving the roles of nonhuman actors in care assemblages under-explored. To address this, we propose a theory–method package that extends PCC with posthumanist perspectives. We applied it in a six-month participatory design process to develop a conversational agent (CA) with four people living with dementia (PlwD), their relatives, and care workers. We report both the design process and analysis of conversations between the CA and one PlwD. Tracing the socio-material and ethical assemblages that emerged in these intra-actions, we identify moments of recognition, validation, holding, and facilitation. Situating these within broader discussions of care, process-oriented ethics, and posthuman design, we illustrate opportunities and limits to design for meaningful experiences of personhood between people with dementia, CAs, and other nonhuman actors.

In Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), vandalization of robots is predominantly framed as senseless or immoral behaviors, with mitigation efforts focused on system design improvements or user education. Drawing on sociological theories of vandalism, we examine three cases of robot destruction in public spaces: the burning of Waymo vehicles in Los Angeles (2025), the vandalism of a Knightscope K5 robot in San Francisco (2017), and the destruction of the hitchhiking robot hitchBOT in Philadelphia (2015). We argue that not all acts of robot vandalism are instances of "malicious" destruction. Rather, some can be understood as ideological or political vandalism - expressive or strategic acts embedded within broader social and political struggles. By situating these events in their urban and discursive contexts, our analysis moves beyond explanations grounded solely in individual psychology or system design, and invites a broader reflection within HRI on how robots as socio-technical artifacts become implicated in the politics of public space, power, and collective life.

Designing for dementia care is challenging due to its complexity, relational nature, and diverse needs.Meaningful design outcomes require bridging a deep understanding of dementia care and the experiences of people with dementia with technological possibilities and constraints.This paper explores hackathons for facilitating such translations in the design of robotic technologies.We conducted two hackathons -one with researchers and care professionals, and another with HCI Master's students -integrating ethnographic insights, theoretical framings, first-hand experiences, and designerly knowledge.Participants' reflections highlight how the format fostered open-ended exploration, interdisciplinary collaboration, and mutual learning through tailored inspiration materials and structured design processes.Evaluating the concepts using Kitwood's framework of person-centred care needs, we find that the hackathons generated meaningful concepts for human and non-human care relations.However, the outcomes also surface ethical considerations related to these relations, emphasising the need for further participatory design processes to refine and situate the outcomes.

The concept of the “user” is central to research in Human- Robot Interaction (HRI). Drawing on the field studies of functional service robots in public spaces, the paper contributes a conceptual framework for describing positions and roles humans can take beyond being robot users. We rely on the concept of “subject position” from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to map out people beyond users into three ecologies: Service, Street Life, and Public Discourse. Through the lens of these ecologies, we highlight how people encounter the robot as (i) an actor in service provision, (ii) a (social and material) actor moving with other members of the street, and (iii) a matter of public concern. The paper contributes a vocabulary for describing the diverse roles of humans and offers methodological suggestions for more holistic research and design of HRI. Further, we outline disciplinary and ethical considerations relating to designing with ecologies in mind.

As autonomous functional robots proliferate in public spaces, understanding their acceptance among diverse populations becomes crucial. Traditional models of technology acceptance focus on behavioral and cognitive factors, overlooking the socio-cultural and temporal scaffolding of human-robot interaction. To address this gap, we present two themes (Identity Matters, Community Matters) resulting from a qualitative analysis of ethnographic interviews (n = 20) with passersby and vendors who have experienced Starship delivery robots deployed in their communities. Situating the outcomes of our analysis in relation to existing technology acceptance models, we offer five lessons contributing to the efforts in understanding existence and usage-related acceptance of autonomous functional robots in public spaces.

Within human-robot interaction (HRI), research on robot personality has largely drawn on trait theories and models, such as the Big Five and OCEAN. We argue that reliance on trait models in HRI has led to a limited understanding of robot personality as a question of stable traits that can be designed into a robot plus how humans with certain traits respond to particular robots. However, trait-based approaches exist alongside other ways of understanding personality, including approaches focusing on more dynamic constructs such as adaptations and narratives. We suggest that a deep understanding of robot personality is only possible through a cross-disciplinary effort to integrate these different approaches. We propose an Integrative Framework for Robot Personality Research (IF), wherein robot personality is defined not as a property of the robot, nor of the human perceiving the robot, but as a complex assemblage of components at the intersection of robot design and human factors. With the IF, we aim to establish a common theoretical grounding for robot personality research that incorporates personality constructs beyond traits and treats these constructs as complementary and fundamentally interdependent.

People’s willingness to help robots has been explored in the lab and in the wild in various settings. While previous studies relied on robotic prototypes, service robots are now already deployed in public spaces. This presents a novel and exciting opportunity for human-robot interaction (HRI) scholars to study robotic technologies in the context of their deployment. In this paper, we present the qualitative methodology and the outcomes of an exploratory mixed-methods (observations, autoethnography, online content analysis) study of people voluntarily helping commercially deployed delivery robots in Tallinn, Estonia. Based on the cumulative findings of the three methods, we discuss how spontaneous help towards robots manifested, the situational factors that may have contributed to the observed helping behaviors, and the role that the perceptions of the robots as cute and helpful may have played in these interactions. While our findings support the assumption that human help is a reasonable mitigation strategy to overcoming the challenges service robots may face in uncontrolled environments, we also emphasize the importance of considering the ethical implications when commercial technology relies in part on passersby to succeed in its tasks.

Focusing on human experience of vulnerability in everyday life interaction scenarios is still a novel approach. So far, only a proof-of-concept online study has been conducted, and to extend this work, we present a follow-up online study. We consider in more detail how human experience of vulnerability caused by a trust violation through a privacy breach affects trust ratings in an interaction scenario with the PEPPER robot assisting with clothes shopping. We report the results from 32 survey responses and 11 semi-structured interviews. Our findings reveal the existence of the privacy paradox also for studying trust in HRI, which is a common observation describing a discrepancy between the stated privacy concerns by people and their behavior to safeguard it. Moreover, we reflect that participants considered only the added value of utility and entertainment when deciding whether or not to interact with the robot again, but not the privacy breach. We conclude that people might tolerate an untrustworthy robot even when they are feeling vulnerable in the everyday life situation of clothes shopping.

Following affective turn in cognitive science, recent decades have witnessed an increasing interest toward the role of emotions in education. Ample evidence suggests that learners and teachers experience a variety of emotions, ranging from joy and pride to anger and frustration. However, when it comes to the design of affective behavior in robotic systems for education purposes, the emphasis has been predominantly on communication of positive emotions. While we recognize that positive emotions are fundamental to successful learning, in this paper we wish to make the case for the consideration of ambivalent emotions for the design of social robots for tutoring. To ground this proposal, we focus on the emotion of teachers' disappointment. First, we discuss under which conditions communicated teachers' disappointment, while it may be experienced as emotionally ambivalent by teachers and students, functions as an affiliating pedagogical strategy. We proceed to sketch out the methodological suggestions we consider relevant for future studies of communicated disappointment in human-robot interactions within learning contexts. We conclude with critical reflections about the ethics of responsible designs of such studies.

With a view to inform the design of a mentor-like synthetic agent that is to engage in a coherent and consistent in character conversation with human subjects, we conducted a data-driven analysis of verbal communication between fictional mentor and mentee characters in films. While in our earlier work the focus was on the conversation strategies of mentor characters, here we present the extended model, wherein conversation activity of both mentor and mentee characters is accounted for. To examine and to formalize local communication actions and extended goals that the two characters achieve jointly, categories of intents, projects and relationship phases were introduced. The resulting annotated corpus of mentor and mentee characters' utterances was analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. In furtherance of the automated in-character dialogue generation task, a range of the state-of-the-art approaches to automated utterances classification was evaluated.

Conversational robots and agents are being designed for educational and/or persuasive tasks, e.g., health or fitness coaching. To pursue such tasks over a long time, they will need a complex model of the strategic goal, a variety of strategies to implement it in interaction, and the capability of strategic talk. Strategic talk is incipient ongoing conversation in which at least one participant has the objective of changing the other participant's attitudes or goals. The paper is based on the observation that strategic talk can stretch over considerable periods of time and a number of conversational segments. Film dialogues are taken as a source to develop a model of the strategic talk of mentor characters. A corpus of film mentor utterances is annotated on the basis of the model, and the data are interpreted to arrive at insights into mentor behavior, especially into the realization and sequencing of strategies.