Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction: "Robots and Design", an interview with Myung-suk Kim

When we think about robots, we inevitably associate them with machines, computers and engineering. Professor Myung-suk Kim, Ph.D., from the Industrial Design department at KAIST (and also Director of the PES laboratory and adviser for the Korea Robotics Society) agreed to be interviewed to show us that this is a misleading and quite obsolete concept.

If we consider the case of Korea, until about 10 years ago design had only a marginal role in the engineering of robots. In fact, in most cases engineers sought help from designers when they had to make their robots look appealing, by designing and creating a pretty shell around the hardware that the engineers had developed. Although this work is necessary, robot designers should have a more active role since the the beginning of the work, at the conceptualization level.

In Professor Kim's words, design has a specific role in robotics: “Thanks to advancements in robotics technology, the groundbreaking results of academic research, and the growth of the robotics market brought on by rising demand, robotics is moving beyond the realm of engineering and becoming an active field of research in the humanities and social sciences. Robot design, in particular, is gaining increasing importance as a means of presenting robots, commonly regarded as technocentric hardware, to new users as software products that combine communication media with services suited for everyday life.”

Thanks to the work and perseverance of people like professor Kim, this is in fact what is beginning to happen. We are seeing more designers involved in the design of robots starting in the early stages of their creation, contributing with usability scenarios and design prototypes. "We make products for ordinary customers, not technology, and we always think of the market: usability is our primary concern", say the researchers at PES lab. I asked them to show me how they normally work in the early stages of robot creation and they showed me some of their approaches.

A common approach of many robotic companies when interacting with designers is to ask for look-and-feel prototypes: this type of prototype helps to envision what the final product will look like and, at times, might drive the choices for the hardware. The look-and-feel prototype is not an empty shell to make a robot appealing, but rather an exploration of what type of emotions the robot can convey to the public: it dictates the personality of the robot at its roots.

Another common approach used by designers is to implement functional prototypes. In this case, the aesthetics of the robots is irrelevant because what matters is what the robot does and the interaction it can establish with users. For instance, making a robotic TV would drastically impact the ecology of current users' homes, requiring substantial alteration of the environment (in this case the goal would be to study the social role of robots in specified settings).

As better explained by Professor Kim, we are urged to think of design in a more general sense (like a "design thinking" attitude) rather than - a usual misconcept - a tool to make robots look pretty: “Because previous work on robotics aimed primarily at technological achievement, the focus tended to be almost exclusively on enhancing the skills and capabilities of robots from a developer’s point of view, rather than on improving user-friendliness. For this reason, there are few products that have succeeded in winning market popularity […]. To address this problem, active effort has begun to be expended on the study of the social attributes of robots.”