Directing the Robot: Scaffolding Creative Human-AI-Robot Interaction
This work addresses the problem of limited human agency and creative collaboration in human-AI-robot interaction for designers, educators, and the general public, offering a conceptual re-framing rather than a concrete solution.
This paper proposes reframing human-AI-robot interaction as scaffolding, enabling humans to shape robotic behavior over time and maintain control in open-ended, improvisational settings. It illustrates this concept through scenarios in creative practice, learning-by-teaching, and embodied interaction.
Robots are moving beyond industrial settings into creative, educational, and public environments where interaction is open-ended and improvisational. Yet much of human-AI-robot interaction remains framed around performance and efficiency, positioning humans as supervisors rather than collaborators. We propose a re-framing of AI interaction with robots as scaffolding: infrastructure that enables humans to shape robotic behaviour over time while remaining meaningfully in control. Through scenarios from creative practice, learning-by-teaching, and embodied interaction, we illustrate how humans can act as executive directors, defining intent and steering revisions, while AI mediates between human expression and robotic execution. We outline design and evaluation implications that foreground creativity, agency, and flow. Finally, we discuss open challenges in social, scalable, and mission-critical contexts. We invite the community to rethink interacting with Robots and AI not as autonomy, but as sustained support for human creativity.