Making Sense of Public Space for Robot Design

Pelikan, Hannah R M; Mutlu, Bilge; Reeves, Stuart

Abstract

If robots are to be deployed in public places, we need to understand what factors their design should consider. Informed by sociological studies of urban settings, particularly the work of William H. Whyte and the Street Life Project, we describe four characteristics of public places that affect and are affected by robot design: (1) localism-how robot design aligns with the identity, culture, and character of the place(s) they reside within; (2) environments-the physical characteristics of the environment in which public robots operate; (3) activities-consideration for the various daily, occasional, and situational activities that are tied to place(s) robots inhabit; and (4) sociability-how people collectively and individually relate to, interact with, and make sense of robots deployed in public places. Throughout, we illustrate these characteristics with examples drawn from empirical studies of public robots. We discuss how these key characteristics of public places can inform HRI design. Index Terms-Human-robot interaction; design frameworks; public robots; urban robots; public mobile robots I. INTRODUCTION With multiplying instances of robot deployment on urban streets [1, 2], shopping complexes [3], and airports [4], there is a need for HRI research to improve its understanding of how public deployments of robots will affect and be affected by the nature of public places. These places are highly complex even in the absence of robots, as demonstrated by the large and growing body of literature on urban placemaking [e.g. 5, 6, 7]. Putting robots in public places involves a multitude of new considerations that both respect and appreciate that complexity. We need to mature the approaches of HRI towards public robots by taking an interest in research that contends with the design of/for public places and of/for public interactions. The purpose here is to synthesise our HRI research on public robots [1, 8, 9] with work from urban sociology and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) on placemaking (i.e., the design, improvement, and purposeful use of public places) [10, 11]. We offer a simple but implicative set of characteristics of/for public spaces that robot-oriented research can use to reflect on present design challenges. Our characteristics build on a tradition of understanding and designing for placemaking initiated by William H. Whyte [12] and continued via organisations such as the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) [13]. We filter placemaking literature through present concerns around robots in public to reach the following key characteristics: localism-how robot design addresses the identity,

Citation

Pelikan, H. R. M., Mutlu, B., & Reeves, S. (2025, March). Making Sense of Public Space for Robot Design. Presented at HRI 2025, Melbourne, Australia

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: HRI 2025
• Start Date: Mar 4, 2025
• End Date: Mar 6, 2025
• Acceptance Date: Jan 6, 2025
• Online Publication Date: Mar 4, 2025
• Publication Date: Mar 4, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jan 6, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 5, 2025
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: HRI '25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/43949185
• External URL: https://robotsinpublic.org/making-space-framework/