Animated Public Furniture as an Interaction Mediator: Engaging Passersby In-the-Wild with Robotic Benches
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing social interaction in public spaces for urban dwellers, representing an incremental step by bridging robotic furniture and urban HCI.
The paper tackled the problem of engaging passersby in urban environments by designing mobile robotic benches that reconfigure in a semi-outdoor public space, finding that the benches' gestural performance manifested three affordances (as robots, spatial elements, and infrastructure) to activate, redistribute, and settle engagement.
Urban HCI investigates how digital technologies shape human behaviour within the social, spatial, temporal dynamics of public space. Meanwhile, robotic furniture research demonstrates how the purposeful animation of mundane utilitarian elements can influence human behaviour in everyday contexts. Taken together, these strands highlight an untapped opportunity to investigate how animated public furniture could mediate social interaction in urban environments. In this paper, we present the design process and in-the-wild study of mobile robotic benches that reconfigure with a semi-outdoor public space. Our findings show that the gestural performance of the benches manifested three affordances perceived by passersby, they activated engagement as robots, redistributed engagement as spatial elements, and settled engagement as infrastructure. We proposed an Affordance Transition Model (ATM) describing how robotic furniture could proactively facilitate transition between these affordances to engage passersby. Our study bridges robotic furniture and urban HCI to activate human experience with the built environment purposefully.