How can we connect with robots without mimicking human traits? Can we build meaningful relationships with nonhuman-like bodies? What if sociality emerges in the encounter itself? The Human-Robot Experience (HRX) Theatre tutorial introduces a participatory methodology for reimagining our relationships with robots through movement-based, experience-centered exploration. Participants will explore how we bodily resonate and make meaning with non-anthropomorphic machines using our Relational Body Mapping (RBM) method, employing robot costumes to facilitate embodied perspective-taking. Adopting a robot's unique perspective to experience its distinct social affordances expands our understanding beyond anthropocentric views, unlocking new modes of nonverbal communication and embodied empathy. Movement and its meaning-making potential are key to HRX. We begin with gentle movement explorations. This heightened sensitivity will shape our first embodied dialogues with artifacts. A live performance with dancers, costumes, and a robot will showcase how RBM harnesses kinesthetic awareness to explore how sociality arises in the encounter. Applying their embodied insights, participants will develop and enact inclusive speculative scenarios through embodied role-play with robot costumes. This tutorial introduces an embodied prototyping approach that leverages the potential of movement dynamics for designing expressive, nonhumanlike robots. Cultivating empathy with machinelike entities could promote the design of more diverse and sustainable relationships that recognize and leverage the differences between humans and robots. No prior dance experience is required; participants will engage at their own comfort level. Join us to explore the transformative potential of movement in reimagining our robotic futures! Supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (FT190100567).

The goal of this study is to identify factors that support and enhance older adults’ creative experiences in human-robot co-creativity. Because the research into the use of robots for creativity support with older adults remains underexplored, we carried out an exploratory case study. We took a participatory approach and collaborated with professional art educators to design a course "Drawing with Robots" for adults aged 65 and over. The course featured human-human and human-robot drawing activities with various types of robots. We observed collaborative drawing interactions, interviewed participants on their experiences, and analyzed collected data. Findings show that participants preferred acting as curators, evaluating creative suggestions from the robot in a teacher or coach role. When we enhanced a robot with a multimodal Large Language Model (LLM), participants appreciated its spoken dialogue capabilities. They reported however, that the robot’s feedback sometimes lacked an understanding of the context, and sensitivity to their artistic goals and preferences. Our findings highlight the potential of LLM-enhanced robots to support creativity and offer future directions for advancing human-robot co-creativity with older adults.

This review is the first step in a long-term research project exploring how social robotics and AI-generated content can contribute to the creative experiences of older adults, with a focus on collaborative drawing and painting. We systematically searched and selected literature on human-robot co-creativity, and analyzed articles to identify methods and strategies for researching co-creative robotics. We found that none of the studies involved older adults, which shows the gap in the literature for this often involved participant group in robotics research. The analyzed literature provides valuable insights into the design of human-robot co-creativity and informs a research agenda to further investigate the topic with older adults. We argue that future research should focus on ecological and developmental perspectives on creativity, on how system behavior can be aligned with the values of older adults, and on the system structures that support this best.

Computer role-playing games (RPGs) often include a simulated morality system as a core design element. Games' morality systems can include both god's eye view aspects, in which certain actions are inherently judged by the simulated world to be good or evil, as well as social simulations, in which non-player characters (NPCs) react to judgments of the player's and each others' activities. Games with a larger amount of social simulation have clear affinities to multi-agent systems (MAS) research on artificial societies. They differ in a number of key respects, however, due to a mixture of pragmatic game-design considerations and their typically strong embeddedness in narrative arcs, resulting in many important aspects of moral systems being represented using explicitly scripted scenarios rather than through agent-based simulations. In this position paper, we argue that these similarities and differences make RPGs a promising challenge domain for MAS research, highlighting features such as moral dilemmas situated in more organic settings than seen in game-theoretic models of social dilemmas, and heterogeneous representations of morality that use both moral calculus systems and social simulation. We illustrate some possible approaches using a case study of the morality systems in the game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

This paper investigates how a non-humanlike, abstract robot can develop a social presence based on its capacity to move in delicate and dynamic ways. We outline our Performative Body Mapping (PBM) method for robot motion design and report on an audience study of our first robot prototype. These early results indicate support for our hypothesis that movement quality can imbue a robot with a distinct sense of affective agency, without the need for a humanlike or pet-like appearance. The paper embeds these accounts in an exploration of the connections between dance, motion design and knowledge translation along a trajectory of kinesthetic experience.

This article reviews the development of computational models of creativity where social interactions are central. We refer to this area as computational social creativity. Its context is described, including the broader study of creativity, the computational modeling of other social phenomena, and computational models of individual creativity. Computational modeling has been applied to a number of areas of social creativity and has the potential to contribute to our understanding of creativity. A number of requirements for computational models of social creativity are common in artificial life and computational social science simulations. Three key themes are identified: (1) computational social creativity research has a critical role to play in understanding creativity as a social phenomenon and advancing computational creativity by making clear epistemological contributions in ways that would be challenging for other approaches; (2) the methodologies developed in artificial life and computational social science carry over directly to computational social creativity; and (3) the combination of computational social creativity with individual models of creativity presents significant opportunities and poses interesting challenges for the development of integrated models of creativity that have yet to be realized.

To explore the possibility of evolving grounded artificial languages for creative design, this paper presents an approach to evolving mappings between spatial relations between simple shapes and artificial utterances. An implementation of this approach is presented, which combines Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR) and Self-Organizing Map (SOM). The results from experiments with this implementation have shown that the transformation between artificial language and design concepts can be realised and the hybrid computational system could be utilised in curious design agents for the evolution of artificial language in computational language games.

Technological artefacts can mediate the relations between humans and the environment: mediation changes our agency, which can be defined as our capacity for action. There can be different types of technological mediation and each type shapes our agency differently. Our model of wearable environments, which combines wearable computing and smart environment approaches, is useful for exploring new types of relations and, by extension, new forms of agency. In this paper, we present the first stage of developing a wearable environment system involving a series of workshops using two prototype devices. We evaluated the workshop activities according to a post-phenomenological account: this has allowed us to analyse the transformation of machine-mediated agency vis-à-vis two dimensions: perception and praxis. Our findings showed that interpretations of sonic and tactile feedback were highly dependent upon the placement of the sensing and effecting capacities of the system.

In this paper, we describe a novel approach to developing computational models of creativity that supports the multiple approaches to the study of artificial creative systems. The artificial creativity approach to the development of computational models of creative systems is described with reference to Csikszentmihalyi's systems view of creativity. Some interesting results from studies using an early implementation of an artificially creative system, The Digital Clockwork Muse, are presented. The different studies show how the artificial creativity approach supports the study of creativity from a variety of standpoints that mirror the disciplines that study human creativity. The use of artificial creativity allows these different studies to be conveniently conducted on the same computational model and integrated in to a more complete picture of the creative process.