We are launching Desirable Futures with Robots, an open initiative of the HRI community and its disciplinary friends, co-led by IIIA with McGill (Canada), Chalmers (Sweden) and Monash (Australia).

Robotics is shifting fast. Within one to two years, autonomous robots are expected to be present in everyday life: at home, at work, in care, in public space. The dominant story told about them runs on efficiency, productivity and replacement. And yet in the contexts where robots will matter most (relationships, care, the intimate and the civic) those are not the criteria we want to optimize for.

That is why we are gathering the community to ask a different question:

Can we invent a caring, feminist, humanist narrative for robots in our society?

The answer will be built together, in public, and from below: through a series of ~100 workshops across 5 continents, each one opening with a what if that reverses the dominant framing: what if a robot was clumsy and sometimes needed our help? what if it didn’t try to save your time, but to waste it well?, and inviting participants to imagine a desirable future growing from there.

Every workshop reports back in a shared format, so the results will aggregate into a public, open-access corpus of imaginaries. Everything culminates in a final event in Barcelona in May 2027, where the collective picture will be presented to researchers, policy makers, industry and media.

We are looking for HRI researchers and adjacent practitioners to facilitate the next workshops in their own context: you keep ownership of what your workshop produces, you get credit in the project’s publications, and you get an invitation to the final event in Barcelona.

Desirable Futures with Robots

active

A distributed series of ~100 workshops across 5 continents, inventing a caring, feminist, humanist narrative for social robots

…or download the workshop kit to get started.