A Playground for Soft Robot Design

Human-Robot Interaction researchers and design researchers in- creasingly recognize that they can benefit from each other’s tools, methods, and approaches. However, there are practical and episte- mological barriers to productively do so. In this demonstration we show how we, as design researchers, developed a playground for making distinctive soft robotic surfaces that can quickly be assem- bled and experienced first-hand. As such, the playground and our process serves as an exemplar of a designerly way of working with HRI.