Mediating Urban Social Encounters - Co-Design of Robotic Street Furniture with Adolescents

With the ongoing shift into the digital, spontaneous social encounters in public spaces are becoming challenging for adolescents. This study explores how robotic street furniture could facilitate meaningful adolescent social interaction. In a focus group and a theater-based co-design workshop, fourteen adolescents envisioned and enacted ten speculative concepts, such as roaming benches that invite serendipitous meetings. An analysis of these concepts identified diverse roles for robots (e.g., icebreaker, scapegoat) and revealed their particular social strengths and weaknesses (e.g., objective yet insistent). These insights were condensed into eight design suggestions, such as designing robots to orchestrate coincidences or framing them as opponents that humans can team up against. We suggest that robots can facilitate adolescents’ social interaction in public spaces, particularly due to certain social strengths inherent in the machinic nature of a robot.