Abstract
In this paper, we explore sketching as a speculative and reflective practice for imagining social robots. Through a series of participatory design workshops, participants observed two prototype robots and then produced sketches and word maps envisioning possible appearances, behaviours, and social roles for robots in everyday life. Analysing the artefacts of these workshops reveals how non-expert human users perceive and imagine future robots in their worlds. We examine common themes of emotion, familiarity, discomfort, and relational values in the artefacts produced by the workshop participants. Our work highlights a way that sketching and written idea generation by non-designers can serve as a tool for thinking through affective, aesthetic, and relational possibilities in human-robot interaction. By situating sketching as a medium for speculative imagination rather than technical specification, our paper contributes to an emerging understanding of Sketching Futures as a relational, situated, and iterative process.
Keywords
Social Robots, HRI, Research-Through-Design, Robot Aesthetics, Participatory Design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2822
Citation
Vanderschantz, N., Turner, J., Konig, J., Timpany, C., Siddika, R., and Shakes, N. (2026) Sketching Social Robots: Visualising Futures of Human–Robot Interaction through Participatory Imagination, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2822
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Sketching Social Robots: Visualising Futures of Human–Robot Interaction through Participatory Imagination
In this paper, we explore sketching as a speculative and reflective practice for imagining social robots. Through a series of participatory design workshops, participants observed two prototype robots and then produced sketches and word maps envisioning possible appearances, behaviours, and social roles for robots in everyday life. Analysing the artefacts of these workshops reveals how non-expert human users perceive and imagine future robots in their worlds. We examine common themes of emotion, familiarity, discomfort, and relational values in the artefacts produced by the workshop participants. Our work highlights a way that sketching and written idea generation by non-designers can serve as a tool for thinking through affective, aesthetic, and relational possibilities in human-robot interaction. By situating sketching as a medium for speculative imagination rather than technical specification, our paper contributes to an emerging understanding of Sketching Futures as a relational, situated, and iterative process.