Nurture Robotic Things: Speculating Future of Human Robot Interaction through Creative Designs with Everyday Objects

Abstract

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has made significant strides in understanding how people form relationships with robots, but has often focused on interactions that are bounded in time and context — capturing how relationships begin, rather than how they grow and change through years of cohabitation, limiting our capacity to explore human-robot relationships and robotic interactions. This workshop explores how creatively robotizing everyday objects can challenge anthropocentric paradigms in HRI and inspire new long-term relational models. Through hands-on prototyping, design fiction, and reflection, participants will investigate how personal attachments to mundane objects might translate into richer, evolving relationships with robotic things. By treating human-object ties as a lens to rethink robot lifecycles and social ecologies, this workshop aims to provoke novel inquiries into how we might nurture robotic entities that learn, adapt, and creating bond over time. By reimagining HRI through the lens of human-object bonds, we aim to foster richer, reciprocal engagements, moving beyond utilitarian and anthropomorphic constraints toward dynamic, meaningful cohabitation.