Call for Papers
“Metaphors for Human-Robot Interactions” Workshop
At the 12th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2020)
November 14-16, 2020
Online
https://robotmetaphors.com/
DEADLINES
Submission deadline: 16 October 2020
Notification of acceptance: 30 October 2020
Camera-ready version: 6 November 2020
Workshop date: November 2020, day TBD (half-day workshop).
Only accepted participants are eligible to attend the workshop.
ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP
Until now, most approaches in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) were centered around a single metaphor, striving towards a human-like, utilitarian, can-do-it-all robot. While this strategy has advantages, it also places unrealistic expectations for robots, which frequently result in disappointment when interacting with them. In this workshop, we call for exploring alternative designs for social robots to cultivate new perspectives on robots, outside the existing norms. Alternative metaphors have been previously successful in breaking through fixation and bringing novel design and products. Furthermore, metaphors can serve as a vessel to wider societal imaginaries of technology and progress.
This is the 1st Edition of the “Metaphors for Human-Robot Interactions” Workshop, held virtually and in conjunction with ICSR 2020 (https://sites.psu.edu/icsr2020/). The aim of this half-day workshop is to use metaphors to reinvent how robots can interact with humans, re-imagine alternative physical shapes for robots, and open up a conversation about the role robots might have in societies.
INVITED SPEAKER – DAN LOCKTON
Lockton Assistant Professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, a Faculty Affiliate of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, and Founder of the Imaginaries Lab. Lockton’s research focuses on the links between design, sense-making, imaginaries, and human action. In his work, Lockton has researched Metaphors as a design tool, and has developed “New Metaphors”, a creative toolkit that uses metaphors to generate novel ideas and re-frame existing problems.
Dan Lockton Website: https://danlockton.com/about/
COLLECTION OF ROBOT METAPHORS
Our goal is to create a “Collection of Metaphors” that could be used within the field of Human-Robot Interaction and to other relevant intersection fields. This Collection will be shared with the community and will provide a reference for alternative designs and interactions between humans and robots. The Collection will be made publicly available after the workshop date.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
Included, but are not limited to:
- Human-robot interaction and robotics
- Design research
- Aesthetic and landscape studies
- Metaphors research, including dystrophic and utopic futurizing
- Speculative, critical, and surreal design studies
- Experimentation across disciplines such as music and sound, psychology, design, architecture, illustration, and additional audio-visual arts
SUBMISSION
Authors are invited to submit a description of a new approach to Human-Robot Interaction through a Metaphor. Authors can choose one of the two submission formats:
(1) 2-page position paper using latex or word templates. Templates can be found here https://sites.psu.edu/icsr2020/submission/ ;
(2) pictorial work with a description of the Metaphor, including films, drawings/sketches, poems, stories, prototypes, hand-made models, or other creative pieces that were created by the authors.
We welcome out of the box ideas. Submission materials should be emailed to robotmetaphors at gmail dot com, and need to be accompanied by a short bio and the cv of the authors. Only accepted participants are eligible to attend the workshop.
AUDIENCE
This workshop encourages designers, artists, writers, film-makers, architects, philosophers, psychologists, computer scientists and engineers, to speculate on alternative metaphors for human-robot interactions. We aim to create a space for discussing different perspectives on how to design social robots that goes beyond the current, singular notion of social robots.
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
- Patrícia Alves-Oliveira, University of Washington, USA
- Maria Luce Lupetti, TU Delft, The Netherlands
- Michal Luria, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Diana Löffler, Siegen University, Germany
For inquiries, robotmetaphors at gmail dot com.