“If, as Shakespeare famously claimed, ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’, robots are the new kids on the block.” Prof. dr. Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) The podcast ‘Acting Like A Robot’ is about the research of the same name within which the VU, UU, HKU and Ulrike Quade…

On 4 March 2025, Maaike Bleeker presented the paper ‘The Human-Robot Ensemble: Designing Expressive Movements for Restaurant Service Robots’, written by Hyumin Lee, Nazli Cila, Klaas Koerten, Maaike Bleeker and Marco Rozendaal, at the HRI’25 in Melbourne. HRI’25 is the 20th edition of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. At HRI, researchers and practitioners

Pick me up, kick me out!  On 21 February 2025, the Dutch newspaper NRC published an interview with Maaike Bleeker on the research project Acting Like a Robot, which concluded festively on 31 January 2025 at De Paardenkathedraal. Read the article here (in Dutch)

Designing Human-Robot Encounters for the CTRL + ALT + PLAY event | By Pascalle Paumen 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

Exploring the Relational and Performative Potential of Smart Materials | By Pascalle Paumen 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

We are delighted to invite you to attend the PhDdefense of Irene Alcubilla Troughton. She will defend her dissertation “Moving Together: A Performings Arts Approach to Human-Robot Interaction Design”. This dissertation tackles an important challenge in human-robot interaction (HRI): how to create meaningful encounters between humans and robots through movement. Traditionally, HRI has focused on…

Robots are an increasingly part of our daily lives. They help provide medical care, care for our homes and gardens, and support education and the workplace. They are increasingly able to perform simple tasks and convey messages, but they also lack many skills needed for interaction and communication. In research project Dramaturgy for Devices, researchers