What Was I Made for? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Layperson-Designed Robots

The social robotics community is increasingly embracing human-centered techniques to design robots that align with users’ needs, preferences, and lived experiences. However, given the known challenges of incorporating laypeople into a design process, little empirical work has tested whether these techniques generate robotic concepts that are accepted and understood by a wider audience. In this mixed-methods online study, we examined how laypeople perceived and evaluated robots that were created through human-centered design. Fifty-two participants assessed a set of laypeople-created healthcare, education, entertainment, and telepresence robot designs according to how successfully each design signaled its intended use case. Our findings demonstrate that layperson-designed robots efficiently communicated their use context. Thus, low-level creative prototyping with end-users can be an effective way of eliciting strong initial design concepts as part of the human-centered design process, though this is influenced by the robot’s application domain. Furthermore, we showcase that simplistic robotic designs are sufficient to cue diverse affordances, highlighting the importance of matching a robot’s appearance to its intended use case. Our findings contribute to the study of human-centered design within social robotics, assessing the tools and activities end-users need to be able to meaningfully contribute to robotic design.