With growing research on haptic interfaces, Mediated Social Touch (MST) technologies offer the potential to record, synthesise, and reproduce (RSR) touch experiences across space and time, enabling, for instance, a hug from afar and from the past. Although much of the existing research highlights the direct benefits of these systems, such as reducing loneliness and providing emotional support, little attention has been paid to their broader sociotechnical impacts. To address this gap, we used the Future Ripples method to speculate on possible effects of MST. We conducted three workshops with 24 participants, including potential users, domain experts, and haptics researchers. Throughout these sessions, participants collectively envisioned possible future scenarios, alongside opportunities and threats, and proposed actionable responses. Our qualitative analysis organised these insights into four themes and three distinctive challenges. These findings offer haptics researchers intervention points across the RSR pipeline to inform MST design, alongside methodological insights from applying Future Ripples to MST technology.

Urban HCI investigates how digital technologies shape human behaviour within the social, spatial, temporal dynamics of public space. Meanwhile, robotic furniture research demonstrates how the purposeful animation of mundane utilitarian elements can influence human behaviour in everyday contexts. Taken together, these strands highlight an untapped opportunity to investigate how animated public furniture could mediate social interaction in urban environments. In this paper, we present the design process and in-the-wild study of mobile robotic benches that reconfigure with a semi-outdoor public space. Our findings show that the gestural performance of the benches manifested three affordances perceived by passersby, they activated engagement as robots, redistributed engagement as spatial elements, and settled engagement as infrastructure. We proposed an Affordance Transition Model (ATM) describing how robotic furniture could proactively facilitate transition between these affordances to engage passersby. Our study bridges robotic furniture and urban HCI to activate human experience with the built environment purposefully.

Uncertainty is an inherent aspect of autonomous vehicle (AV) decision-making, yet it is rarely communicated to pedestrians, which hinders transparency.This study investigates how AV uncertainty can be conveyed through two approaches: explicit communication (confidence percentage displays) and implicit communication (vehicle motion cues), across different confidence levels (high and low).Through a within-subject VR experiment (N=26), we evaluated these approaches in a crossing scenario, assessing interface qualities (visibility and intuitiveness), how well the information conveyed the vehicle's level of confidence, and their impact on participants' perceived safety, trust, and user experience.Our results show that explicit communication is more effective and preferred for conveying uncertainty, enhancing safety, trust, and user experience.Conversely, implicit communication introduces ambiguity, especially when AV confidence is low.This research provides empirical insights into how uncertainty communication shapes pedestrian interpretation of AV behaviour and offer design guidance for external interfaces that integrate uncertainty as a communicative element.

Autonomous mobility systems increasingly operate in environments shared with animals, from urban pets to wildlife.However, their design has largely focused on human interaction, with limited understanding of how non-human species perceive, respond to, or are affected by these systems.Motivated by research in Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) and more-than-human design, this study investigates animal interactions with autonomous mobility through a multi-method approach combining a scoping review (45 articles), online ethnography (39 YouTube videos and 11 Reddit discussions), and expert interviews (8 participants).Our analysis surfaces five key areas of concern: Physical Impact (e.g., collisions, failures to detect), Behavioural Effects (e.g., avoidance, stress), Accessibility Concerns (particularly for service animals), Ethics and Regulations, and Urban Disturbance.We conclude with design and policy directions aimed at supporting multispecies coexistence in the age of autonomous systems.This work underscores the importance of incorporating non-human perspectives to ensure safer, more inclusive futures for all species.

Uncertainty inherently exists in the autonomous decision-making process of robots. Involving humans in resolving this uncertainty not only helps robots mitigate it but is also crucial for improving human-robot interactions. However, in public urban spaces filled with unpredictability, robots often face heightened uncertainty without direct human collaborators. This study investigates how robots can engage bystanders for assistance in public spaces when encountering uncertainty and examines how these interactions impact bystanders' perceptions and attitudes towards robots. We designed and tested a speculative `peephole' concept that engages bystanders in resolving urban robot uncertainty. Our design is guided by considerations of non-intrusiveness and eliciting initiative in an implicit manner, considering bystanders' unique role as non-obligated participants in relation to urban robots. Drawing from field study findings, we highlight the potential of involving bystanders to mitigate urban robots' technological imperfections to both address operational challenges and foster public acceptance of urban robots. Furthermore, we offer design implications to encourage bystanders' involvement in mitigating the imperfections.

Virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly utilised as a simulation tool for human-robot interaction (HRI) studies due to its ability to facilitate fast and flexible prototyping. Despite efforts to achieve high validity in VR studies, haptic sensation, an essential sensory modality for perception and a critical factor in enhancing VR realism, is often absent from these experiments. Studying an interactive robot help-seeking scenario, we used a VR simulation with haptic gloves that provide highly realistic tactile and force feedback to examine the effects of haptic sensation on VR-based HRI. We compared participants’ sense of presence and their assessments of the robot to a traditional setup using hand controllers. Our results indicate that haptic sensation enhanced participants’ social and self-presence in VR and fostered more diverse and natural bodily engagement. Additionally, haptic sensations significantly influenced participants’ affective-related perceptions of the robot. Our study provides insights to guide HRI researchers in building VR-based simulations that better align with their study contexts and objectives.

Abstract Autonomous vehicles (AVs) tend to disrupt the atmosphere and pedestrian experience in urban shared spaces, undermining the focus of these spaces on people and placemaking. We investigate how external human-machine interfaces (eHMIs) supporting AV-pedestrian interaction can be extended to consider the characteristics of an urban shared space. Inspired by urban HCI, we devised three place-based eHMI designs that (i) enhance a conventional intent eHMI and (ii) exhibit content and physical integration with the space. In an evaluation study, 25 participants experienced the eHMIs in an immersive simulation of the space via virtual reality and shared their impressions through think-aloud, interviews, and questionnaires. Results showed that the place-based eHMIs had a notable effect on influencing the perception of AV interaction, including aspects like visual aesthetics and sense of reassurance, and on fostering a sense of place, such as social interactivity and the intentionality to coexist. In measuring qualities of pedestrian experience, we found that perceived safety significantly correlated with user experience and affect, including the attractiveness of eHMIs and feelings of pleasantness. The paper opens the avenue for exploring how eHMIs may contribute to the placemaking goals of pedestrian-centric spaces and improve the experience of people encountering AVs within these environments.

Meaningful interactions positively impact users’ meaning-making and feeling socially and culturally connected with their surroundings. However, creating such interactions is a continuous, complex challenge. We present the Traces in Use design concept supporting interface contextualization for meaningful human–environment interactions in public places. The concept was developed and evaluated in three steps: (I) exploring traces of use characteristics as inspiration for design, (II) introducing the concept definition, its theoretical evaluation, and a supporting framework, and (III) practically evaluating the concept by developing, contextualizing, and testing three interfaces (a lion interface, a drum, and a storyteller) in two empirical field studies (N = 40). The results show that the concept promotes meaningful interaction by supporting users’ feelings of socio-cultural connectedness and meaning-making. With this, our work contributes the Traces in Use design concept, its development, and its methodological application for meaningful human–environment interactions and interface contextualization in public places.

Robots in urban environments will inevitably encounter situations beyond their capabilities (e.g., delivery robots unable to press traffic light buttons), necessitating bystander assistance. These spontaneous collaborations possess challenges distinct from traditional human-robot collaboration, requiring design investigation and tailored interaction strategies. This study investigates playful help-seeking as a strategy to encourage such bystander assistance. We compared our designed playful help-seeking concepts against two existing robot help-seeking strategies: verbal speech and emotional expression. To assess these strategies and their impact on bystanders’ experience and attitudes towards urban robots, we conducted a virtual reality evaluation study with 24 participants. Playful help-seeking enhanced people’s willingness to help robots, a tendency more pronounced in scenarios requiring greater physical effort. Verbal help-seeking was perceived less polite, raising stronger discomfort assessments. Emotional expression help-seeking elicited empathy while leading to lower cognitive trust. The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative results highlights considerations for robot help-seeking from bystanders.

As intelligent agents transition from controlled to uncontrolled environments, they face challenges that sometimes exceed their operational capabilities. In many scenarios, they rely on assistance from bystanders to overcome those challenges. Using robots that get stuck in urban settings as an example, we investigate how agents can prompt bystanders into providing assistance. We conducted four focus group sessions with 17 participants that involved bodystorming, where participants assumed the role of robots and bystander pedestrians in role-playing activities. Generating insights from both assumed robot and bystander perspectives, we were able to identify potential non-verbal help-seeking strategies (i.e., addressing bystanders, cueing intentions, and displaying emotions) and factors shaping the assistive behaviours of bystanders. Drawing on these findings, we offer design considerations for help-seeking urban robots and other agents operating in uncontrolled environments to foster casual collaboration, encompass expressiveness, align with agent social categories, and curate appropriate incentives.

Policymakers advocate for the use of external Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) to allow autonomous vehicles (AVs) to communicate their intentions or status. Nonetheless, scalability concerns in complex traffic scenarios arise, such as potentially increasing pedestrian cognitive load or conveying contradictory signals. Building upon precursory works, our study explores ‘interconnected eHMIs,’ where multiple AV interfaces are interconnected to provide pedestrians with clear and unified information. In a virtual reality study (N=32), we assessed the effectiveness of this concept in improving pedestrian safety and their crossing experience. We compared these results against two conditions: no eHMIs and unconnected eHMIs. Results indicated interconnected eHMIs enhanced safety feelings and encouraged cautious crossings. However, certain design elements, such as the use of the colour red, led to confusion and discomfort. Prior knowledge slightly influenced perceptions of interconnected eHMIs, underscoring the need for refined user education. We conclude with practical implications and future eHMI design research directions.

The deployment of autonomous delivery robots in urban environments presents unique challenges in navigating complex traffic conditions and interacting with diverse road and sidewalk users. Effective communication between robots and road and sidewalk users is crucial to address these challenges. This study investigates real-world encounter scenarios where delivery robots and road and sidewalk users interact, seeking to understand the essential role of communication in ensuring seamless encounters. Following an online ethnography approach, we collected 117 user-generated videos from TikTok and their associated 2,067 comments. Our systematic analysis revealed several design opportunities to augment communication between delivery robots and road and sidewalk users, which include facilitating multi-party path negotiation, managing unexpected robot behaviour via transparency information, and expressing robot limitations to request human assistance. Moreover, the triangulation of video and comments analysis provides a set of design considerations to realise these opportunities. The findings contribute to understanding the operational context of delivery robots and offer insights for designing interactions with road and sidewalk users, facilitating their integration into urban spaces.

As mobile robots enter shared urban spaces, operating in close proximity to people, this raises new challenges in terms of how these robots communicate with passers-by. Following an iterative process involving expert focus groups (n=8), we designed an augmented reality concept that visualises the robot's navigation intent and the pedestrian's predicted path. To understand the impact of path visualisations on trust, sense of agency, user experience, and robot understandability, we conducted a virtual reality evaluation (n=20). We compared visualising both robot intent and pedestrian path prediction against just visualising robot intent and a baseline without augmentation. The presence of path visualisations resulted in a significant improvement of trust. Triangulation of quantitative and qualitative results further highlights the impact of pedestrian path prediction visualisation on robot understandability as it allows for exploratory interaction.

The ability of autonomous vehicles (AVs) to interact socially with pedestrians poses a significant impact on their integration with urban traffic. This is particularly important for vehicle-pedestrian shared spaces due to increased social requirements in comparison to vehicular roads. Current pedestrian experience in shared spaces suffers from negative attitudes towards AVs and the consequently low acceptability of AVs in these spaces. HRI work shows that the acceptability of robots in public spaces can be positively impacted by their perceived sociability (i.e., possessing social skills), which can be enhanced by their ability to express emotions. Inspired by this approach, we follow a systematic process to design emotional expressions for AVs using the headlight ("eye'') area and investigate their impact on perceived sociability of AVs in shared spaces, by conducting expert focus groups (N=12) and an online video-based user study (N=106). Our findings confirm that the perceived sociability of AVs can be enhanced by emotional expressions indicated through emotional eyes. We further discuss implications of our findings for improving pedestrian experience and attitude in shared spaces and highlight opportunities to use AVs' emotional expressions as a new external communication strategy for future research.

We propose a workshop stemming from ongoing conversations about the role of design methods and designed artefacts within the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Given the growing interest in understanding what the field can learn from design explorations, the workshop focuses on hands-on annotating activity where participants (researchers and practitioners from HRI, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design Research) will analyze and reflect upon selected collections of robotic artefacts. Ultimate goal of the workshop is to explicate values, concepts and perspectives that usually remain tacitly embedded in the designed artefacts and, as such, hard to appreciate as proper HRI contributions. The expected outcome of the workshop is a set of methodological recommendations and concrete examples of what kind of knowledge can be generated through robotic artefacts.

In this paper, we investigate how to elicit new perspectives in research-through-design (RtD) studies through annotated portfolios. Situating the usage in human-robot interaction (HRI), we used two robotic artefacts as a case study: we first created our own annotated portfolio and subsequently ran online workshops during which we asked HRI experts to annotate our robotic artefacts. We report on the different aspects revealed about the value, use, and further improvements of the robotic artefacts through using the annotated portfolio technique ourselves versus using it with experts. We suggest that annotated portfolios – when performed by external experts – allow design researchers to obtain a form of creative and generative peer critique. Our paper offers methodological considerations for conducting expert annotation sessions. Further, we discuss the use of annotated portfolios to unveil designerly HRI knowledge in RtD studies.

The rise of autonomous systems in cities, such as automated vehicles (AVs), requires new approaches for prototyping and evaluating how people interact with those systems through context-based user interfaces, such as external human-machine interfaces (eHMIs). In this paper, we present a comparative study of three prototype representations (real-world VR, computer-generated VR, real-world video) of an eHMI in a mixed-methods study with 42 participants. Quantitative results show that while the real-world VR representation results in higher sense of presence, no significant differences in user experience and trust towards the AV itself were found. However, interview data shows that participants focused on different experiential and perceptual aspects in each of the prototype representations. These differences are linked to spatial awareness and perceived realism of the AV behaviour and its context, affecting in turn how participants assess trust and the eHMI. The paper offers guidelines for prototyping and evaluating context-based interfaces through simulations.

HCI researchers have begun to more systematically study non-digital transient approaches for displaying information in public space, for example, in the form of chalk infographics. These approaches provide several benefits compared to digital displays, such as: ad-hoc deployment, barrier-free interaction, and being more sustainable. However, one limitation is their hyperlocal scale and impact. Speculating on urban robots as agents for scaling up physicalised displays, we describe the exploratory design and deployment of Woodie, a slow-moving robot that draws on the ground using conventional chalk sticks. We deployed Woodie for three weeks in a quiet laneway situated within a highly urbanised area. Data collected from observations, video logs and interviews revealed that Woodie successfully attracted people's attention and acted as a facilitator for collaborative, creative placemaking. Furthermore, Woodie provoked emotional responses and was perceived as a living being. Findings are interpreted to describe opportunities urban robots provide for the design of future pervasive urban displays.

This paper presents the design of Woodie, a free-moving urban robot which draws on the ground with conventional chalk sticks, using the public space as a large art canvas. We outline the motivation and design considerations, which led the design process of the lightweight robotic device aiming to stage creative placemaking activities. Along this path, we relate to the various roles of 'embodiment' apparent in this placemaking investigation, such as the robot's physical appearance and coupling with the urban environment; the engagement of visitors into natural tangible interactions; and their involvement of physical activities around the precinct. We discuss our observation on how those embodied interactions emerged, and further elaborate on them as perspectives to inform future work.

Recent studies have investigated new approaches for communicating an autonomous vehicle's (AV) intent and awareness to pedestrians. This paper adds to this body of work by presenting the design and evaluation of in-situ projections on the road. Our design combines common traffic light patterns with aesthetic visual elements. We describe the iterative design process and the prototyping methods used in each stage. The final design concept was represented as a virtual reality simulation and evaluated with 18 participants in four different street crossing scenarios, which included three scenarios that simulated various degrees of system errors. We found that different design elements were able to support participants' confidence in their decision even when the AV failed to correctly detect their presence. We also identified elements in our design that needed to be more clearly communicated. Based on these findings, the paper presents a series of design recommendations for projection-based communication between AVs and pedestrians.

Low-resolution (low-res) lighting displays are increasingly used by HCI researchers, designers, and in the industry as a versatile and aesthetic medium for deploying ambient interfaces in various contexts. These display types distinguish themselves from conventional high-res screens through: high contrasts, hi-power LED technology which allows visibility even in bright environments, and their ability to take on three-dimensional free forms. However, to date most work on low-res displays has been either of experimental nature or carried out in isolated industry contexts. This paper addresses this gap through an analysis of our own experiences from previous experimental design studies and related work, which led us to five domain challenges for designing low-res displays. We then describe how we approached these challenges in a deployment study, which involved the implementation of a prototype guided by a low-res prototyping toolkit. Based on an analysis of our design process and findings from the deployment study, we present ten design recommendations for low-res lighting displays.

Low-resolution lighting displays are commonplace in internet-of-things devices, wearable products and embedded interfaces. However, prototyping such displays is challenging and cumbersome as methods, specific domain knowledge and skills are only available to experts. In this paper we present a novel toolkit to assist with designing and evaluating the characteristics of low-resolution lighting displays as well as content variations using different materials. We describe the components of the toolkit, which include a tablet, a custom-built app and low-cost prototyping materials, and its use within the context of a design study. The toolkit can easily be replicated and adopted by others working in this domain to prototype low-resolution lighting displays without requiring any previous expertise in hardware prototyping.

In this work we present our approach for creating interactive media façades by using purpose-built tools. They are intended to create prototypes and conduct field investigations in this domain. We share our vision of an extended design process which describes ways to engage large user groups by urban prototyping and experience novel interventions in public places. Architects, designers and researchers can receive first hand insights into the suitability of their chosen interaction design concept for media architecture by using our tools and approach.