The 3rd Workshop on Designerly Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) aims to bring together scholars and practitioners engaged in design-oriented research to articulate the value of design research within HRI broadly. We propose a half-day workshop to (1) collectively map the diversity of design research in HRI, examining how contributions are framed and how quality is evaluated; (2) discuss participants’ HRI design projects, showcased in an exhibition setting; and (3) conclude with a focused conversation to identify common ground across diverse approaches and develop strategies for strengthening the position of design research in HRI and its connections with other HRI disciplinary communities.

This industry white paper presents a research design for studying Sweden's first deployment of unaccompanied autonomous delivery robot fleets in Stockholm, marking an important milestone in Swedish urban robotics implementation. Through a two-year longitudinal study combining ethnographic field observations, video data collection, and multi-stakeholder workshops, we will document the practical realities of integrating delivery robots into dense urban environments. We aim to identify recurring operational barriers including permit uncertainties, challenges around community integration, and robot-human interaction patterns across different seasons and contexts. We approach this complex problem through cross-sector collaboration between academia, industry, municipalities, and regulatory bodies, with the goal to develop actionable policy implications for cities, robot operators, and national policymakers as well as contributing to international standards development. 

Mobile robots must behave intelligibly to be acceptable in public spaces. Designing social navigation algorithms for delivery robots requires different areas of expertise. The paper reports on an interdisciplinary collaboration between two ethnomethodological conversation analysts, a human factors psychologist, and two motion planning engineers. Based on video recordings of a robot moving among people, the team developed and implemented different sound and movement designs, which were iteratively tested in real-world deployments. This work contributes insights on how interdisciplinary collaboration can be facilitated in the area of social robot navigation and an iterative process for designing robot sound and movement grounded in real-world observations.

Robots on dense urban sidewalks enter environments in which space is contested. While prior work has described how bystanders and passersby accommodate delivery robots, we still lack a deeper understanding of what kind of problems emerge when autonomous robots enter a new area. This paper builds on 9 hours of fieldwork conducted during the early weeks of a delivery robot rollout in a European capital, characterized by a mixture of wide and narrow sidewalks. We describe emerging observations that highlight the contested and negotiated nature of these spaces, in which people make their trajectories readable, projecting where they will go next and establishing local traffic norms. 

Sustainability is becoming an increasingly urgent concern in technology research, yet its meaning and application within Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) remain unclear. We examined how sustainability is currently understood within the HRI community through i) a survey among HRI researchers and ii) a “speculative futures” workshop held at the HRI 2025 conference. We compare the results of our analysis to the widely adopted three-pillar model of sustainability (delineating environmental, social, and economic aspects) and contrast it to alternative frameworks that critique this categorisation. Our findings show strong—but unacknowledged—engagement with social and environmental sustainability within the HRI community. We highlight common ground, lack of shared understanding, and areas of improvement across the community, and suggest practical steps for integrating sustainability into HRI research. We formulate aspects that should be included in a definition of sustainability that is specific to HRI.

In the Human-Robot Interaction community, Wizard of Oz (WoZ) is a commonly employed method where researchers aim to study user perceptions of robot technologies regardless of technical limitations. Despite the continued usage of WoZ, questions concerning ethical tensions and effects on the wizard remain. For instance, how do wizards experience interacting through technology, given the different roles and characters to enact, and the different environments to situate themselves in. In addition, the wizard’s experiences and affects on results, continues to be under-explored. The goal of this workshop is to surface ethical, practical, methodological, personal, and philosophical tensions in the WoZ method. Though a collaborative session, we seek to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to be a wizard through eliciting first-person experiences of researchers. As a result, we hope to formulate guidelines for future wizards.

The proliferation of robots in public spaces necessitates a deeper understanding of how these robots can interact with those they share the space with. In this paper, we present findings from video analysis of publicly deployed cleaning robots in a transit space—a major commercial airport, using their navigational “troubles” as a tool to document what robots currently lack in interactional competence. We demonstrate that these robots, while technically proficient, can disrupt the social order of a space due to their inability to understand core aspects of human movement: mutual adjustment to others, the significance of understanding social groups, and the purpose of different locations. In discussion we argue for exploring a new design space of movement: socially-aware movement. By developing strong concepts that treat movement as an interactional and collaborative accomplishment, we can create systems that better integrate into the everyday rhythms of public life.

The concept of the "user” is central to research in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Drawing on the field studies of functional service robots in public spaces, the paper contributes a conceptual framework for describing positions and roles humans can take beyond being robot users. We rely on the concept of "subject position” from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to map out people beyond users into three ecologies: Service, Street Life, and Public Discourse. Through the lens of these ecologies, we highlight how people encounter the robot as (i) an actor in service provision, (ii) a (social and material) actor moving with other members of the street, and (iii) a matter of public concern. The paper contributes a vocabulary for describing the diverse roles of humans and offers methodological suggestions for more holistic research and design of HRI. Further, we outline disciplinary and ethical considerations relating to designing with ecologies in mind.

If robots are to be deployed in public places, we need to understand what factors their design should consider. Informed by sociological studies of urban settings, particularly the work of William H. Whyte and the Street Life Project, we describe four characteristics of public places that affect and are affected by robot design: (1) localism—how robot design aligns with the identity, culture, and character of the place(s) they reside within; (2) environments—the physical characteristics of the environment in which public robots operate; (3) activities—consideration for the various daily, occasional, and situational activities that are tied to place(s) robots inhabit; and (4) sociability—how people collectively and individually relate to, interact with, and make sense of robots deployed in public places. Throughout, we illustrate these characteristics with examples drawn from empirical studies of public robots. We discuss how these key characteristics of public places can inform HRI design.

As we see robots being deployed into new places in everyday life, questions arise about what `human-robot collaboration' (HRC) might look like there. At the same time, HRC researchers are looking to CSCW for better conceptualisations of `collaboration', and recent work has called for more CSCW-oriented studies of HRC to support this. We address this via an ethnomethodological study of encounters between pedestrians and food delivery robots on public streets. Our analysis—using video recorded fragments of what happens on the streets—demonstrates how passers-by continuously manage walking trajectories in ways that account for robot actions; specifically we articulate how people accomplish practices of following and overtaking robots, passing by and crossing paths with them. We then show that the picture of human-robot collaboration is drawn with distinct asymmetries of action and intelligibility, where humans contribute considerable work to get something that looks like `collaboration' achieved. This raises fundamental questions for how we talk about concepts of collaboration in HRC from a CSCW perspective, and how such notions can and should be applied to activities which include robots.