Forming friendship with peers from diverse backgrounds is key to children’s social emotional development. In this study, we explored the use of social robot, Haru, as mediator for remote communication in children group, to support connection and friendship building. We invited children from different countries aged from 10 to 15 to participate in two interaction sessions with peers from other countries, after which we conducted interviews with children from three countries, focusing on their experiences, and perceptions of the robot’s roles in the process. The findings indicated that social robot Haru effectively served as an icebreaker and entertainer; However, improvements are needed in conversation flow, transitions between different roles, and supporting children’s autonomy in guiding the conversation and the depth of their communication.

In this paper, we investigate how a customer-facing service robot can support decision making in shopping interactions. In this role, a robot needs sometimes to reject a customer’s choice. Thus, we investigate different rejection strategies with the goal of changing customer behavior. The implemented strategies have been developed based on an ethnographic study on assisted shopping and tested in a lab experiment with 31 participants. The experiment showed significant differences in trust ratings and decision-making depending on the employed strategy.

The workshop investigates two major boundaries within HRI design and research: Firstly, we aim to cross the boundaries of engaging in interdisciplinary collaboration of such divergent disciplines as engineering, design, psychology, philosophy and sociology. Secondly, we aim to cross the boundaries of HRI design and social contexts of use - often referred to as ‘real world’ environments. This endeavor is not new, however we aim for approaching these two boarders of HRI research and design more systematically, e.g. by providing new methodological impulses. The idea of “configuring” has a long tradition in Science and Technology Studies (STS) to describe how potential users and use cases are shaped and in turn reshaped (configured) throughout technology design - be it explicitly or accidentally. Given HRI is becoming deeper integrated in ‘real world’ contexts, such as public spaces, homes and care facilities, we argue for the need for a re-configuration. This includes a critical reflection of material, procedural and methodological implications that shape future users within HRI design practices - for and together with people.

The main goal of this workshop is to establish awareness of the emerging field of socially assistive shopping robots in human-robot interaction (HRI) and, simultaneously, to foster interdisciplinary approaches that combine the development of social robots with a sequential and embodied perspective regarding mutual processes of understanding in shopping interactions with assistive robots.

In earlier work it has been shown how culture can be used as a parameter influencing human robot interaction in general (e.g. [1]). While this is a good starting point, in our work with concrete application fields we encounter that culture in its usual definition as national culture (e.g. [2]; [3]) is too general a concept to be useful in these concrete applications. Thus, we shifted our focus instead to a concept of local cultural practices, which is derived from situated practices as in Wengers communities of practice [4] and grounded loosely in Sperbers idea of an epidemiology of representations [5], i.e. culture or rather cultural practices as an emergent phenomenon from learning processes in a given group. Developing this new kind of culture-aware robots can then not start from a general definition of culture like Hofstede [2], Schwartz and Sagiv [6], etc. but has to take the actual group of users (and stakeholders) into account. We exemplify this approach with our work in a residency for citizens with acquired brain damage.