Presenting and Exploring Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction Design Through Bodystorming

In the coming era of ubiquitous robotics we envision the need for the effortless design of contextually-aware interactions with robots. Ubiquitous robots create a number of challenges for designers. Firstly, due to their dynamic nature, prototyping requires skillful programming and is often time consuming. Moreover, these devices are often context-aware and their behavior is affected by people, objects, and their environment. Existing tools for human-robot interaction designers require programming expertise, do not leverage design methodologies such as iterative design, and do not support in-situ user testing. We propose that bodystorming can be used as an effective method in this process, to communicate needfinding results and to explore the design of situated interactions with robots. As a case study, we first conduct a series of interviews and observe the workflow of human-robot interaction designers, to better understand the challenges they face. We summarize the insights gathered from our needfinding, including challenges around data capture and information overload. We then describe how we used a mystery-game-style role-playing activity in an interactive workshop to communicate our findings, induce empathy, and initiate an effective ideation phase. Finally, we summarize the learnings from this workshop and how such bodystorming techniques can be used to communicate needfinding results at early stages of the human-robot interaction design process.