Designing for Robot Wranglers: A Synthesis of Literature and Practice

The rapid advancement of robotics is reshaping what it means for humans and robots to coexist -- through expanded capabilities, more intuitive interactions, and deeper integration into real-world workflows. Beyond sharing physical space, this coexistence is increasingly characterized by organizational embeddedness, temporal evolution, social situatedness, and open-ended uncertainty. Because such coexistence extends beyond a single encounter, understanding healthcare robots requires looking beyond initial acceptance to how stakeholders' perceptions evolve through continued engagement. Yet, prior work has largely relied on single-point snapshots of attitudes and acceptance, offering limited insight into coexistence as a long-term, dynamic process. We address these gaps through in-depth follow-up interviews with nine participants from a 14-week co-design study on healthcare robots. We identify the human perception space, which includes four interpretive dimensions (i.e., degree of decomposition, source of evidence, scope of reasoning, and temporal orientation). We enrich the conceptual framework of human-robot coexistence by conceptualizing the mutual relationship between the human perception space and the robot design space as a co-evolving loop, in which human needs, design decisions, situated interpretations, and social mediation continuously reshape one another over time. Building on this, we propose considerate human-robot coexistence, arguing that humans act not only as design contributors but also as interpreters and mediators who actively shape how robots are understood and integrated across deployment stages. Our related prior work and supplementary materials, including the interview protocol, are available at https://byc-sophie.github.io/considerate-human-robot-coexistence/

Robots designed to mediate human groups often fall into the solutionist trap: they are framed as sociable agents that fix problems such as conflict, disengagement, or lack of coordination. We suggest a different way of thinking. Rather than discrete agents, robots can be understood as situated elements of shared environments; catalysts and carriers of group experience whose meaning emerges through how people position, interpret, and interact with them. From this perspective, robots are not there to repair some ostensible dysfunctionality, but to enable group-level sense-making around care, norms, and identity. Our prior work on robotic street furniture suggests that this does not happen by imitating human sociality but by taking the shape of deliberately constrained, group-facing entities that happen and act for \textit{us} without being socially entangled as one of us. We thus understand robots in public spaces not in terms of autonomy or intelligence, but as a relational capacity. This implies designing robots not in our image or for our utility, but grounded in our needs in being and becoming together.

When designing robots' nonverbal behaviors, many researchers have turned to arts-based insights, such as Disney's Animation Principles. Yet, while these principles bear key insights into the design of like-life characters, their application to robot design is inherently limited, in part because animation is not constrained by real-world physics, and in part because animation principles focus on low level animation mechanics and not high-level design considerations for physically embodied, interactive characters. In contrast, little attention has been paid to art forms like puppetry, despite their long history of exploring morphological, behavior, and interaction design of physically embodied, interactive characters. As such, in this work we leverage puppetry texts and practicing puppeteers' expert knowledge knowledge to derive a set of puppetry principles with key insights for robot design. As we show, these insights go beyond -- and uniquely complement -- the prior insights provided by theater, dance, and animation.