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Mechanical Ottoman: How Robotic Furniture Offers and Withdraws Support

Published: 02 March 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes our approach to designing, developing behaviors for, and exploring the use of, a robotic footstool, which we named the mechanical ottoman. By approaching unsuspecting participants and attempting to get them to place their feet on the footstool, and then later attempting to break the engagement and get people to take their feet down, we sought to understand whether and how motion can be used by non-anthropomorphic robots to engage people in joint action. In several embodied design improvisation sessions, we observed a tension between people perceiving the ottoman as a living being, such as a pet, and simultaneously as a functional object, which requests that they place their feet on it-something they would not ordinarily do with a pet. In a follow-up lab study (N=20), we found that most participants did make use of the footstool, although several chose not to place their feet on it for this reason. We also found that participants who rested their feet understood a brief lift and drop movement as a request to withdraw, and formed detailed notions about the footstool's agenda, ascribing intentions based on its movement alone.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '15: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
March 2015
368 pages
ISBN:9781450328838
DOI:10.1145/2696454
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 March 2015

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  1. embodied design improvisation
  2. laboratory experiment
  3. metaphors
  4. social attribution
  5. wizard of oz

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  • (2024)User Perceptions and Experiences with Smart Homes - The Smart Home as an Obedient Guard Dog, Disinterested Cat, Ambitious Octopus or Busy BeehiveProceedings of Mensch und Computer 202410.1145/3670653.3670659(171-183)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Tangible Scenography as a Holistic Design Method for Human-Robot InteractionProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661530(459-475)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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