We invite submissions to the special session Skillful Practices in Social Robotics and HRI – Approaches from the Performing Arts at the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2026), held 1–4 July 2026 in London, UK. CALL FOR PROPOSALS The past decades have witnessed increased recognition of the relevance of skills and expertise from the

by Soyun Jang In November 2025, I visited the Centre for Transformative Media Technology at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, for a 15-day research exchange. Recently having moved to a new location, the centre had acquired a large studio space for a motion capture system, social robotics, and a volumetric capture system. While

At the beginning of December, PhD Candidate Enne Lampe, within the Dramaturgy for Devices project responsible for research on designing service robots for the hospitality sector, attended IASDR 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan. The theme of this years International Association of Societies of Design Research conference was ‘Design NEXT’. What is next for design as a discipline? Should it adapt

Science and theatre seem like two different worlds. Yet theatre can tell us something about what our future with robots will look like. ‘Theatre knowledge is relevant to robot development.’ Daan Appels wrote a series about feelings for robots for NEMO Kennislink, the journalistic platform of NEMO Science Museum. In his first article, he talks

On 26th and 27th September 2024, Amy Winter and her collaborators at TU/e’s Material Aesthetics Lab, Maaike Bleeker and Marco Rozendaal organised a workshop that delved into the potential of soft robotic technologies to animate expressive forms, creating novel interactions between humans and systems. Results of the workshop were presented at the Dutch Design Week

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

ELRAT | European Lab for Robots in Arts and Theatre

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

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