Designing Robotic Imaginaries: Narratives and Futures

Current status quo, beliefs, and wishes about robotic technologies are shaped by centuries of stories that people have told about humans and machines and our relationships. How we imagine future robotic technology thus influences how we act in society to what is possible and desirable. At the intersection of the design and HRI, a growing body of work explicitly addresses how we shape robotic imaginaries narratives to develop alternative imaginaries and futures through design futuring. In this chapter, we introduce a set of diverse designing futuring approaches that have been explored and used in human-robot interaction (HRI) to critique, provoke, examine, and challenge assumptions, values, ideologies, and socio-behavioral norms embedded implicitly and explicitly in HRI design.