Long Paper
Robots in service design: Considering uncertainty in social interaction with robots
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07:00PM
Please be aware that multiple presentations will take place during this session commencing at 06:15PM AEDT and share the same zoom link. Check how presentations are clustered in the program spreadsheet when adding the calendar.
As robots become more prevalent in society, they will also become part of service systems, and will be among the materials that designers work with. The body of literature on robots in service systems is scarce, in service research as well as in service design research, especially regarding how to understand robots in service, and how design for service is impacted. In this conceptual paper we aim to shed light on how social robots will affect service. We take a look at the current state of robots’ ability to interact socially with people and highlight some of the issues that need to be considered when including social robots as part of service.
In navigating the social world, people exhibit an intentional stance, in which they rely on assumptions that social behaviour is governed by underlying mental states, such as beliefs and desires. Due to fundamental differences between humans and robots, people’s attribution of the mental state of robots, such as what a particular robot knows and believes, is often precarious and leads to uncertainty in interactions, partly relating to issues with common ground. Additionally, people might hesitate to initiate interactions with robots, based on considerations of privacy and trust, or due to negative attitudes towards them. Designing for service systems where e.g. a robot is being introduced, requires knowledge and understanding of these issues from a design perspective. Service designers therefore need to consider not only the technical aspects of robots, but the specific issues that arise in interactions because of them.
Europe (CET): 3rd February 2021 8:15 am to 9:00 am
US (EST): 3rd February 2021 2:15 am to 3:00 am
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My research focus on what happens to design when it meets new theoretical or practice areas, and seeks to integrate with these, such as the practices of service design, design for policy, and design for service.
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Johan Blomkvist is a senior researcher at the Computer and Information Science Department at Linköping University. His research focuses on service prototyping and understanding the relationship between people and physical manifestations of service and design artefacts. Based on research within cognitive science and related fields, he has suggested new tools and explored existing ones throughout the development of service design in an academic context.
Full professor of cognitive science at the University of Skövde – and as of July 2016 also full professor of cognitive systems at IDA, Linköping University.
My general research interests are in theories and models of situated, embodied and distributed cognition. The current focus is on human interaction with autonomous systems – social robots in particular, but also automated vehicles, etc. Moreover, I have a long-standing interest in embodiment, i.e. the fundamental role(s) the body plays in cognition and emotion, in social interactions, and in people’s interactions with different types of technology. Another long-standing interest is recurrent neural networks and their use in cognitive modeling, adaptive robotics, etc.
My PhD work focuses on the role of the intentional stance — i.e., people’s common-sense or intuitive understanding of others as agents with beliefs, desires, and other so called "intentional states" — in human-robot interactions. My research aims to elucidate some of the challenges or difficulties associated with predicting and explaining the behavior of robots based on the intentional stance, and to develop appropriate methodology for studying the intentional stance toward robots empirically.
When Tim Overkamp moved from product design to service design, he became interested in how service ideas are implemented. This became the topic of his PhD in Design at the Department of Computer and Information Science at Linköping University in Sweden. In his thesis, which he successfully defended in 2019, he developed two perspectives on service transformation that address how services change, as well as how service developers and designers can support those changes. He is currently interested in how organisations can use design as a way of learning, in order to successfully transform their services in a continuous way.