A Playground for Soft Robot Design

Human-Robot Interaction researchers and design researchers increasingly recognize that they can benefit from each other's tools, methods, and approaches. However, there are practical and epistemological 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 assembled and experienced first-hand. As such, the playground and our process serves as an exemplar of a designerly way of working with HRI.