Participatory Design and End-User Programming for Human-Robot Interaction

The Participatory Design and End-User Program-ming for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) workshop aims to advance research on how to design systems that can be used by end users to program robots. There tends to be a fracture in HRI between the technical designers of robot programs (often engineers or computer scientists) and the actual users of such robots. Developers have the capabilities to program robots but often lack insights possessed by domain experts, sometimes leading to technically interesting but impractical systems. With this workshop, we aim to bridge two different methods often used individually within the wider HRI community to involve end users in robot program design: Participatory Design (PD) and End-User Programming (EUP). Both methods empower end users to co-produce robots addressing real-world needs. However, there have been limited opportunities to unite researchers who specialize in these areas and engage in mutual learning. We will address this shortcoming with a full-day workshop, which will put the PD and EUP communities in touch, inviting speakers from both sides and welcoming a wide range of publications from describing new end-user programming methods to compiling insights learned from conducting participatory design studies.