Empathic Entanglements: Designing with and for Robot Others
PUBLICATION DATE: 11 November, 2025 PUBLICATION AUTHOR/S: Jared Donovan, Dagmar Reinhardt, Glenda Caldwell, Muge Belek Fialho Teixeira, Lian Loke, Markus Rittenbruch, Mari VelonakiThis workshop explores how robots become expressive, empathic entities through amplified behaviours, animal-like movement, and textile augmentation. We frame robotic expression as a more-than-human intelligence, communicated through body, rhythm, and responsive materials. Participants will design and prototype robot personas using soft materials, lights, and costume-like extensions. These robots do not speak, they gesture, react, and relate through motion, tension, texture, and spatial choreography. Drawing from animal behaviour, participants co-create nonverbal interactions that bypass the uncanny valley, generating alliances that are felt rather than spoken. Through embodied exercises and textile fabrication, participants (ad)dress robots as animal-inspired others – spiky, fluid, woolly, twitchy – highlighting how robotic identity can emerge from physical behaviour and tactile surface rather than anthropomorphic form. The workshop asks: How do we design for robotic acceptance without assuming sameness? How can we amplify machine behaviours to evoke empathy without spoken/verbal/human language? And how might textile interfaces–elastic bands, feathers, stretch fabric–mediate new forms of connection between human and robot bodies? Together, we develop short performance vignettes of robotically amplified movement and behaviour, expanding the design of HRI beyond functional or social robotics into speculative, somatic, and more-than-human territories. This workshop reimagines robotic interaction as material empathy—felt through contact, not commands.
RELATED PROGRAM/S:Human-Robot-Interaction Publication link
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