Design students in higher education often lack hands-on understanding and tools for designing Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). While many commercially available educational robot platforms require users to have extensive training or prior experience, we developed ADA, an entry-level robot prototyping platform, for design students without any previous background in robotics and programming to better explore and conceptualize HRI design concepts in the early stages of design processes. This paper reports on the design and development of AIDA, along with our pedagogical reflections on its implementation with bodystorming techniques in an interaction design course over the past two years. Our findings show that using AIDA with bodystorming enabled students to rapidly prototype HRI concepts by tinkering with available materials, generate design concepts in situated contexts, and foresee potential unintended HRI consequences from a user’s perspective. For platforms with similar goals, our study suggests that hardware and software accessibility is important for designers to easily conduct HRI concept exploration and prototyping. The tinkerability of the platform proves handy particularly when used in bodystorming for designers to identify interaction problems and rapidly prototype and test solutions. The in-situ perspective, where designers “become the robot” and dynamically switch between the roles of user and robot, facilitates a tacit understanding of what robots can and cannot do when interacting with users in their activities.

Public transportation in urban environments should be inclusive and accessible to offer this service for all people. This research aims to identify issues in the development of autonomous shuttle services in future public transportation systems for children with intellectual disabilities. An issue-based information system (IBIS) analysis was retrospectively conducted based on a concept generation phase. Four concepts were evaluated by five experts. The findings show that the main tensions in this context can be categorized as interaction, physical, and independence. Interactive elements can both create value and lead to confusion for the target group. The physical design of concepts affects feasibility, viability, and perception. Independence is a desired quality for the target group but often comes at a price of less independence for other stakeholders such as family members. Finally, the study suggests that there are tensions between the qualities of integrity, cognition, and user experience.

If Design is about forming materials, then what are the materials of Service Design? In this ground-breaking book, Johan Blomkvist, Simon Clatworthy and Stefan Holmlid explore this question by establishing a discourse around the materials of service design, discussing materials as a means to explore what service design is and could be.

Services, and failures associated with it, are nestled in systemic contexts. It is important to understand how disruptions might ripple out in services, as well as how actors influence disruptions and possible failures through their participation, as this can impact value creation. This paper reports the results of an interview study supported by a card mapping tool. The main contribution of this work is its generative methodological approach when exploring service disruptions from a systems lens. Using this method, we classify eight forms of disruption: request, query, hiccup, delay, mistake, flaw, breakdown and the unexpected, and associated systemic activation patterns. We suggest a disruption-activation ripple model and identify five tensions in responding to disruptions: competing priorities, dealing with difficult others, mismatching expectations, shouldering responsibility, and reluctant assistance. We posit that this generative tool can be used to understand the nature and extent of disruptions in situated service contexts. This understanding can provide direction on how to handle and/or absorb variety emerging in different interactions by clarifying frequency and predictability of certain kinds of disruptions in investigated contexts. We also argue that viewing service disruptions through a systems lens requires the designing of social service infrastructures that support employee relationships.

This paper presents the result of a pilot survey study about challenges faced by practicing service designers. Challenges include: 1) low awareness of what service design is and how to use service design in organisations; 2) issues with involving people in the design process; such as getting the right stakeholders on board and doing user research; 3) assessing the business and organisational value of service design and the extent to which it is able to actually change roles within organisations; 4) design in the organisation where silos, culture, maturity, willingness to change and acceptance of design can all limit the usefulness of service design, 5) obstacles to implementation and 6) designer identity and how it can impact expectations. While some of these challenges are inherent to design approaches, others keep recurring in studies of (service) design practice and should be given more attention and taken seriously by academia.

As robots become more prevalent in society, they will also become part of service systems, and will be among the materials that designers work with. The body of literature on robots in service systems is scarce, in service research as well as in service design research, especially regarding how to understand robots in service, and how design for service is impacted. In this conceptual paper we aim to shed light on how social robots will affect service. We take a look at the current state of robots’ ability to interact socially with people and highlight some of the issues that need to be considered when including social robots as part of service.

In navigating the social world, people exhibit an intentional stance, in which they rely on assumptions that social behaviour is governed by underlying mental states, such as beliefs and desires. Due to fundamental differences between humans and robots, people’s attribution of the mental state of robots, such as what a particular robot knows and believes, is often precarious and leads to uncertainty in interactions, partly relating to issues with common ground. Additionally, people might hesitate to initiate interactions with robots, based on considerations of privacy and trust, or due to negative attitudes towards them. Designing for service systems where e.g. a robot is being introduced, requires knowledge and understanding of these issues from a design perspective. Service designers therefore need to consider not only the technical aspects of robots, but the specific issues that arise in interactions because of them.

Service encompasses multiple interaction processes among many different actors. Comprehending the subtleties of what drives actors resource integration activities could therefore be valuable when designing for service. However, these nuances are not necessarily always captured in early representations such as prototypes of service due to variation in individual interpretation of situations. This paper draws on strong concepts from interaction design as a generative intermediate-level form of knowledge, to conceptualise perceived action potential (PAP) as a strong concept through the use of illustrative examples. PAP refers to the subjective interpretation of an individualï¿œs (own) scope of action in new or unforeseen situations. This paper elucidates the implications of PAP for service design and suggests future research opportunities. In introducing strong concepts to service design, it also translates how strong concepts might be identified and subsequently constructed in service design research in order to aid practice.

Service-dominant logic (SDL) is a theoretical framework that has impacted the development of service design. Resource integration, a core concept in SDL, provides a distinctive perspective that changes the perception of value in situations of interaction. In this paper, we explore the implications of applying the resource integration view on interaction in the context of an illustrative design project. We argue that considering the resources of each actor in a design situation elevates the discussion towards a more strategic level of service and value creation. Through the example, we draw implications of utilising this perspective in specifying, positioning and shaping interactions in the system to provide value for different actors.

Personal communication between User-Centered Design (UCD) specialists and developers is important for communicating user needs and design solutions in agile development. In distributed projects where opportunities for personal communication are limited, the design documentation is an important surrogate. This study has investigated the perceived effectiveness of boundary objects in a distributed agile team, and their role in communicating target user needs. Six in-depth interviews with UCD specialists showed that the boundary objects rarely communicate underlying needs of the users but rather focus on interaction with the system that is being developed. The used boundary objects also do not work as stand-alone deliverables; they need to be explained and elaborated. Making the boundary objects comprehensive enough to be stand-alone is seen as too time consuming and not worth the effort. For agile projects with distributed teams, this creates hand-over and follow-up problems.

In practice based research, especially when working with non-research organisations, sometimes researchers face challenges related to the willingness of participants to openly share experiences outside the realms of the project. As a consequence there are methodological challenges with showing results, and working with knowledge verification. In this paper we suggest that some of these obstacles might be dealt with by using service archetypes.