On May 20, 2026, the Grote Zaal at Muntstraat 2A (Utrecht University) hosted the TiM Seminar Session “Griefbots in Research and on the Stage,” led by Ulrike Quade, Sorcha Ní Bhraonáin, and Evelyn Wan. Maaike Bleeker, leader of D4D project, organized the event together with Laura Karreman, who served as moderator. The event was divided…

On Monday 11 May 2026, Dramaturgy for Devices (D4D) organised a workshop in Delft at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE), called “Countertechnique for Engineers.” The workshop served as an introduction to Countertechnique, aiming to discover inspiration and practical methodologies for integrating the technique into human-robot interaction (HRI). This seminar emerged from the Dance…

On December 9th, 2025, the kick-off of Daniël van Klaveren’s work-in-progress Robot Opera (provisional title) took place at Theater Sonnevanck in Enschede. Drawing scenographic inspiration from Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel The Electric State, the play is set in a junkyard inhabited by abandoned household objects. Among the devices scattered on stage—including a vacuum cleaner and…

On the 6th of February, Dramaturgy for Devices and Robotstories | Expanding Narratives organised a collaborative exploration of Prompts & Theater. With the advent of LLMs, the concept of “prompt” has entered the HRI vocabulary. However, in the theater domain, formulas and systems resembling what a prompt might be for AI have been in use for much longer. For example, Forsythe’s Improvisation…

On September 25th 2025, Dramaturgy for Devices organized a workshop on dance knowledge. The participants included choreographers, roboticists, dramaturges, and performance scholars, each of whom brought their own distinct understanding of and relation to dance. Four choreographers/researchers were invited to share their view of what dance knowledge entails. The aim of the workshop was to…

VU Lecture by Laura Karreman and Ulrike Quade On December 1st, 2025, Dr. Laura Karreman—Associate Professor in Media and Performance Studies at Utrecht University (UU)—and Ulrike Quade—theater director, artistic researcher, puppeteer, and scenographer—gave a lecture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) titled The Dramaturgy of Robots on Stage. The lecture was presented in the context

Designing Human-Robot Encounters for the CTRL + ALT + PLAY event From November 28 to November 30, 2024, researchers of the Dramaturgy for Devices project gathered in Utrecht for a second joint workshop to experiment with human-robot interactions. This time, we explored designing with and for encounters using the Rober robot – a table-like serving

Exploring the Relational and Performative Potential of Smart Materials On September 26, 2024, I attended the workshop “Expressive Mechanisms: From Petri-dish to Performativity” which took place at the Innovation:Lab at Theater Utrecht. The workshop was organised by 4TU.Design United, coordinated by Amy Winters from TU/e, and involved researchers of the Dramaturgy for Devices project to…