Uploaded May 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Robots have been increasingly leaving laboratories. Especially social robots are soon to become part of our everyday life. But what does it mean in practice?
In the field of Human-Robot Interaction, or HRI, in order to design and develop social robots that best serve people, we typically look at interactions between humans and robots.
Most of them take place in the laboratory or otherwise highly controlled settings.
At the same time, more and more studies have been conducted in the real-life environments.
This implies a change in focus and moving away from studying human-robot ‘interaction’ towards ‘experience’.
We propose to bring such a shift even further and investigate human lived experiences and meanings they have for the communities involved with social robots in a given socio-cultural and physical space.
The emphasis on the communities is a key since this is how we live our everyday lives and where social robots will bring the most. In this sense, the shift in HRI is not only towards addressing lived experiences or everyday environments but a human ‘social life’ as a whole.
What theories and methods should be used to address human lived experiences with social robots? What counts as communities and how do we define ‘the everyday’? This is the task that yet needs to be accomplished in the HRI field.
In any case, the transition has already started. Get ready for the HRI of everyday life.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 895785
Robots have been increasingly leaving laboratories. Especially social robots are soon to become part of our everyday life. But what does it mean in practice?
In the field of Human-Robot Interaction, or HRI, in order to design and develop social robots that best serve people, we typically look at interactions between humans and robots.
Most of them take place in the laboratory or otherwise highly controlled settings.
At the same time, more and more studies have been conducted in the real-life environments.
This implies a change in focus and moving away from studying human-robot ‘interaction’ towards ‘experience’.
We propose to bring such a shift even further and investigate human lived experiences and meanings they have for the communities involved with social robots in a given socio-cultural and physical space.
The emphasis on the communities is a key since this is how we live our everyday lives and where social robots will bring the most. In this sense, the shift in HRI is not only towards addressing lived experiences or everyday environments but a human ‘social life’ as a whole.
What theories and methods should be used to address human lived experiences with social robots? What counts as communities and how do we define ‘the everyday’? This is the task that yet needs to be accomplished in the HRI field.
In any case, the transition has already started. Get ready for the HRI of everyday life.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 895785
