Participatory design is increasingly used to address the negative social impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), aiming for more inclusive and equitable innovation. However, it can inadvertently reproduce injustice and reinforce power imbalances, even with good intentions. While the HCI community is critical of these issues, the existing knowledge is often fragmented, making it challenging for AI researchers and policymakers to navigate. This paper presents a scoping review of participatory AI research in HCI focused on justice. We detail how participatory AI unfolds in practice and offers methodological insights on the roles of researchers and partnership with communities, the practical and contextual challenges, the role of reflexivity and situatedness and the essential but not so central role of artefacts in participatory processes. We conclude with recommendations for engaging in participatory design to promote justice in AI systems.

A line of research in HCI and HRI has started to consider robot failures, errors, and breakdowns not as problems to be eliminated, but as opportunities to inform and enrich design. This shift has led to growing interest in how robotic fallibility affects user trust, interaction quality, and system acceptance. In this paper, we inquire into what it means to design with fallibility. Drawing on feminist technoscience, we examine how current approaches frame the roles of designers and users (agency), how research methods shape the phenomena they study (performativity), and how underlying research goals carry ethical and epistemological implications (motivation). In recognizing robotic fallibility as a sociotechnical phenomenon and design research as a world-making practice, we provide design considerations that promote more reflexive, inclusive, and politically aware engagements with (robot) failure in HRI and HCI.

Smart home technologies embed values such as sustainability, comfort, privacy, and security, which can sometimes conflict with one another, considering the complexities of domestic environments. This paper investigates the potential implications of these value conflicts and the corresponding design challenges. Through an enactment session and co-speculations with professional actors, we explored what it means to navigate multiple values simultaneously, live with products that impose their own values, and manage value conflicts both with and among smart products. The findings challenge the seamless and harmonious vision of smart homes conceived by technologists, proposing shifts in the common narrative: from value alignment to value transparency, from service provision to mutual care, and from autonomy to responsiveness. We discuss that acknowledging value conflicts, rather than eliminating them, is an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of users and home environments and guide the design of smart home technologies.

This paper explores the design of expressive movements for service robots in fine-dining restaurants, using a performative approach to understand how robots can be integrated and accepted in complex real-world settings. Drawing on dramaturgical principles, we conducted three research and design activities-speculative enactments, scenario building, and extended reality (XR) simulations-to examine how specific movements of a restaurant service robot and the contexts in which they are performed influence the experiences of guests, serving staff, and managers. We propose that such robots can be conceptualized as “ensemblists,“ capable of adopting multiple roles and collaborating with humans in a larger choreography of service delivery. The study concludes by reflecting on the strengths and limitations of performative approaches in HRI, emphasizing the need to move beyond traditional one-on-one human-robot interaction models and, instead, to consider how robots perform their roles in complex, dynamic environments involving multiple actors.

Using HRI theory to inform robot development is an important, but difficult, endeavor. This paper explores the relationship between HRI theory and HRI practice through a design project on the development of design guidelines for human-robot communication together with a dairy farming robot manufacturer. The design guidelines, a type of intermediate-level knowledge, were intended to enrich the specialized knowledge of the company on farming context with relevant academic knowledge. In this process, we identified that HRI theories were used as a frame, a tool, best practices, and a reference; while the HRI practice provided a context, a reference, and validation for the theories. Our intended contribution is to propose a means to facilitate exchanges both ways between HRI theory and practice and add to the emerging repertoire of designerly ways of producing knowledge in HRI.

With the advancements in AI, agents (i.e., smart products, robots, software agents) are increasingly capable of working closely together with humans in a variety of ways while benefiting from each other. These human-agent collaborations have gained growing attention in the HCI community; however, the field lacks clear guidelines on how to design the agents’ behaviors in collaborations. In this paper, the qualities that are relevant for designers to create robust and pleasant human-agent collaborations were investigated. Bratman's Shared Cooperative Activity framework was used to identify the core characteristics of collaborations and survey the most important issues in the design of human-agent collaborations, namely code-of-conduct, task delegation, autonomy and control, intelligibility, common ground, offering help and requesting help. The aim of this work is to add structure to this growing and important facet of HCI research and operationalize the concept of human-agent collaboration with concrete design considerations.

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.

This paper is a methodological replication of Barendregt et al. [11], who urged Child-Computer Interaction field to embrace Intermediate Level Knowledge as a meaningful and valid way of generating knowledge. We extend this epistemological gap to the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Currently, artefact-centered papers—papers that present the development of an artefact—seem to be one of the primary ways that the HRI field generates knowledge. In this paper, we made an analysis of all papers presented at the HRI Conference from 2006 to 2020. Our results indicate that the 41,2 % of the papers were artefact-centered; and the impact of them, measured in the number of citations, was significantly lower than other kinds of papers. We used 23 artefact-centered papers to formulate two strong concepts and investigate how the foundational design epistemology about intermediate-level knowledge and RtD can contribute to other design-related disciplines to produce useful and valuable knowledge.

Interest in design methods and tools has been steadily growing in HRI. Yet, design is not acknowledged as a discipline with specific epistemology and methodology. Designerly HRI work is validated through user studies which, we argue, provide a limited account of the knowledge design produces. This paper aims to broaden current understanding of designerly HRI work and its contributions by unpacking what designerly knowledge is and how to produce it. Through a critical analysis of current HRI design literature, we identify a lack of work dedicated to understanding the conceptual implications of robotic artifacts. These, in fact, are implicit carriers of crucial HRI knowledge that can challenge established assumptions about how a robot should look, act, and be like. We conclude by discussing a set of practices desirable to legitimize designerly HRI work, and calling for further research addressing the conceptual implications designerly HRI work.

This paper addresses the design dilemmas that arise when distributed ledger technologies (DLT) are to be applied in the governance of artificial material commons. DLTs, such as blockchain, are often presented as enabling technologies for self-governing communities, provided by their consensus mechanisms, transparent administration, and incentives for collaboration and cooperation. Yet, these affordances may also undermine public values such as privacy and displace human agency in governance procedures. In this paper, the conflicts regarding the governance of communities which collectively manage and produce a commons are discussed through the case of a fictional energy community. Three mechanisms are identified in this process: tracking use of and contributions to the commons; managing resources, and negotiating the underlying rule sets and user rights. Our effort is aimed at contributing to the HCI community by introducing a framework of three mechanisms and six design dilemmas that can aid in balancing conflicting values in the design of local platforms for commons-based resource management.

Design-based inquiries into the networked products of the Internet of Things (IoT) lack a coherent understanding of the effect of such products on society. This paper proposes a new taxonomy for networked products, which would allow articulation on their current state and future, and provide insights to designers for creating meaningful and aesthetic products of IoT. Central to this framework is the proposition that our current product-scape should be understood as a distribution of material agencies and best analyzed through the metaphor of "agency". We identify three types of agencies, i.e., the Collector, the Actor, and the Creator, and discuss how this approach could create new design methodologies to create more meaningful networked products that would empower people in their everyday lives.

Drawing from a study of everyday home practices from a material objects' perspective, this paper examines the potential that a thing ethnography holds for both design and anthropology. In doing so, the paper challenges anthropocentric assumptions about the world, and opens up ways of understanding relationships among people, objects and use practices that would be difficult to elicit through traditional observations and interviews alone.