Designing robots. Towards an ethical culture of the aesthetic product

Over the last years, service robots with applications in social contexts have developed increasingly sophisticated and intuitive natural communication languages and social skills. Designed in human likeness or with synthetic designs, this kind of robot is the subject of a multidisciplinary activity, in which Design is involved in the design project together with engineering, and the support of anthropology and psychology. The HERE research project wants to give quantitative and qualitative analysis methods and guidelines for an ethical planning of robotic services and products with a high level of accessibility and acceptance by users. The research laboratory concerns university spaces, where telepresence robots are set up as virtual appendixes for students that could not be present.