Can You Design a Robot Otherwise?

As robots become increasingly present in public, domestic and professional environments, they are typically designed to be visible, efficient and recognisably human-like. The workshop and the bootcamps invited students to challenge these conventions by asking a simple question: Can robots be designed differently?

Rather than designing robots that constantly demand attention, participants explored how body, movement and behaviour influence perception, interaction, and the relationships that develop between humans and intelligent machines.

Throughout the workshop, students were encouraged to experiment with different approaches to Human–Robot Interaction. One of these proposed adopting a more-than-human perspective as a way of looking beyond human-centred assumptions.

Working from the perspective of a selected non-human entity observed during a field trip to Parco Segantini, near the Domus Academy campus, students translated alternative ways of sensing, perceiving and interacting with the environment into datasets. The activity became an opportunity to rethink how different actors and forms of intelligence are entangled, moving beyond human exceptionalism and exploring how relationships emerge through communication, movement, and coexistence. In the context of robotics, this provided an opportunity to investigate how synthetic agents and humans interact, negotiate agency, and shape one another in new and unexpected ways.

The workshop resulted in a series of design proposals that challenged conventional ideas of what robots should look like, how they should behave and what role they could play in everyday life. Instead of acting as efficient assistants or human replacements, many of the concepts explored robots with their own rhythms, behaviours and forms of agency, showing how personality can emerge through movement, interaction and presence rather than human likeness.

Across the projects, students experimented with alternative forms, scales and behavioural patterns, opening up new possibilities for imagining relationships between humans, technology and the environments they share.