Championing Research Through Design in HRI
This addresses a methodological gap for HRI researchers, but it is incremental as it proposes adapting existing methods from another field.
The paper tackles the challenge of integrating exploratory design methods, specifically Research through Design (RtD), from the CHI community into Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) to address gaps in acceptable design research methods, arguing that RtD can enable HRI researchers to conduct and share exploratory design work.
One of the challenges in conducting research on the intersection of the CHI and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) communities is in addressing the gap of acceptable design research methods between the two. While HRI is focused on interaction with robots and includes design research in its scope, the community is not as accustomed to exploratory design methods as the CHI community. This workshop paper argues for bringing exploratory design, and specifically Research through Design (RtD) methods that have been established in CHI for the past decade to the foreground of HRI. RtD can enable design researchers in the field of HRI to conduct exploratory design work that asks what is the right thing to design and share it within the community.