Designing Robots for Families: In-Situ Prototyping for Contextual Reminders on Family Routines

TL;DR

This study explores how family routines can guide the design of social robots for home environments, involving co-design, prototyping, and a four-day in-home deployment to understand their acceptance and challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a co-design approach for integrating robots into family routines and provides practical insights from in-home deployment to inform future designs.

Findings

Families appreciated the reminder functions and offloading tasks.

Tensions around timing, authority, and family dynamics were observed.

Design implications for contextual reminders in family settings.

Abstract

Robots are increasingly entering the daily lives of families, yet their successful integration into domestic life remains a challenge. We explore family routines as a critical entry point for understanding how robots might find a sustainable role in everyday family settings. Together with each of the ten families, we co-designed robot interactions and behaviors, and a plan for the robot to support their chosen routines, accounting for contextual factors such as timing, participants, locations, and the activities in the environment. We then designed, prototyped, and deployed a mobile social robot as a four-day, in-home user study. Families welcomed the robot's reminders, with parents especially appreciating the offloading of some reminding tasks. At the same time, interviews revealed tensions around timing, authority, and family dynamics, highlighting the complexity of integrating robots into households beyond the immediate task of reminders. Based on these insights, we offer design implications for robot-facilitated contextual reminders and discuss broader considerations for designing robots for family settings.