Typically, social robots are supposed to empathize with humans, understand human emotions, and anticipate human needs. With this chapter, the authors turn the table: What can humans learn through empathizing with technology? How might the design of robots change if developers adopted the perspective of a robot, walking in its shoes to perceive and understand the world from its point of view thr…
What kind of robots do we want to live with in the future? Which ones do we not want? How will robots affect our everyday lives? What will be the consequences of our coexistence with them? Roboticists tend to focus on the product design of the robot, its exact configuration, and its technical implementation; rarely is any thought given to the far-reaching social consequences that might arise wh…
Robots are often designed to increase efficiency. They are typically positioned in a particular field of application to replace humans, making someone’s work obsolete. But robots are able to complement the humans they work with through collaboration and the incorporation of the psychological strengths that robots can have in social situations. This chapter presents a co-design method based on…
Social robots are on the brink of entering our lives. However, little knowledge is available about how best to design them. This introductory chapter discusses the real-life social robots of the present as well as of possible futures—without, of course, forgetting the history of robots and their origins in fiction. From a design perspective, robots are promising and challenging. They suggest …