Experience design for robotic products : understanding child-robot interaction through the perspective of social relationships

Abstract

In the course of applying robot technology to various products, robotic products are increasing in people’s daily life. According to significant differences from existing products concerning appearance, autonomy, and movement, robotic products allow social interactions with users and are expected to bring innovative changes in the user’s lifestyle and product use patterns. However, most robotic products have been developed through a technology-driven research approach, so that they lack software-like, emotional and cultural requirements, which are expected by users. Recently, many researches are conducted to investigate user’s perceptions of or reactions to robots in HRI, yet there still is a need to study about overall experiences encountered by robot-users. This study focuses on the actual interactions of robotic products, and seeks to build a theoretical model, which explains patterns of child-robot interactions and children’s experiences resulting from them through the perspective of social relationships. For this, an HRI research methodology for designers has been developed and two kinds of HRI experiments -Study 1, Study 2- have been conducted accordingly. Differently from the robot-centric researches that robot engineers have done, the HRI research that product designers pursue is a user-centered research, which studies on how robot-users perceive and respond to robots, and how they adjust their behavior as a result to such response. This study is basically qualitative in that it tries to figure out children’s behaviors and their characteristics in interacting with robotic products, however, some quantitative research techniques have been utilized to enhance reliability of overall research processes and efficiency of the hypothesis verification. Study 1 seeks to understand “how children interact with robots in their everyday lives” in a school environment and to grasp the specialty of that through hermeneutic and naturalistic approaches. For this pur...