Co-designing Zoomorphic Robot Concepts for Animal Welfare Education

TL;DR

This paper explores participatory design of zoomorphic robots for animal welfare education, emphasizing appearance, behavior, and narrative to enhance children's understanding and interactions with animals.

Contribution

It introduces novel participatory design activities and highlights key design considerations for creating effective animal-like robots for educational purposes.

Findings

Children react negatively to undesirable behaviors

Facial features and tails signal animal internal states

Furry appearance and texture are preferred

Abstract

Animal welfare education could greatly benefit from customized robots to help children learn about animals and their behavior, and thereby promote positive, safe child-animal interactions. To this end, we ran Participatory Design workshops with animal welfare educators and children to identify key requirements for zoomorphic robots from their perspectives. Our findings encompass a zoomorphic robot's appearance, behavior, and features, as well as concepts for a narrative surrounding the robot. Through comparing and contrasting the two groups, we find the importance of: negative reactions to undesirable behavior from children; using the facial features and tail to provide cues signaling an animal's internal state; and a natural, furry appearance and texture. We also contribute some novel activities for Participatory Design with children, including branching storyboards inspired by thematic apperception tests and interactive narratives, and reflect on some of the key design challenges of achieving consensus between the groups, despite much overlap in their design concepts.