While social robots participation increases in everyday human life,
their presence in diverse contexts and situations is expected. At the
same point, users tend to become more demanding regarding their roles,
abilities, behaviour and appearance. Thus, designers and developers are
confronted with the need to design more sophisticated robots that can
produce such a positive reaction from users so as to become well
accepted in various cases of use. Like this, Human-Robot Interaction has
become a developing area.
Emotions are an important part in human life, since they mediate the
interaction with other humans, entities and/or products. In recent
years, there has been an increase in the importance of emotions applied
to the design field, giving rise to the so-called Emotional Design area.
In the case of Human-Robot Interaction, the emotional design can help to
elicit (e.g., pleasurable) or prevent (e.g., unpleasant)
emotional/affective reactions/responses.
This book gives a practical introduction to emotional design in
human-robot interaction and supports designers with knowledge and
research tools to help them take design decisions based on a
User-Centred Design approach. It should also be useful to people
interested in design processes, even if not directly related to the
design of social robots but, instead, to other technology-based
artefacts. The text is meant as a reference source with practical
guidelines and advice for design issues.
