Overview

Desirable Futures with Robots is an open initiative of the HRI community and its disciplinary friends, co-led by IIIA with McGill, Chalmers and Monash. It is a distributed series of ~100 workshops, across 5 continents (2026-2027), aimed at inventing a caring, feminist, humanist narrative for social robots before the dominant one settles.

Robotics is shifting fast: within one to two years, autonomous and semi-autonomous robots are expected to be present in everyday life — at home, at work, in care, in public space. The prevailing framing of such robots runs on efficiency, productivity and replacement, positioning robots in competition with humans. But in domestic, relational, civic and intimate settings those are not the criteria we want to optimize for.

Objectives

1. Reclaim the narrative: examine and challenge the silent convergence on robots as efficient surrogates for human labour, with the humanoid form as the most visible default.
2. Imagine alternative futures: through the question: can we invent a caring, feminist, humanist narrative for robots in our society?
3. Plant seeds in many soils: workshops do not replace long-term in-situ deployment; they plant alternative imaginaries across cultures before the dominant narrative finishes setting.
4. Synthesize and present: at a final event in Barcelona, May 2027, to researchers, policy makers, industry and media, and in a top-tier journal acknowledging all workshop co-organizers.

How it works

Each workshop opens with a what if that reverses one element of the dominant framing (e.g. what if a robot was clumsy and sometimes needed our help?) and invites participants to imagine a desirable future growing from there. Researchers act as local facilitators in their own context; formats vary by audience (role-play, drawing, speculative fiction, scene-building, interviews…) but every workshop reports back in a shared reporting format, so results aggregate into something larger.

All materials are shared as a single workshop kit (rationale, the what if bank, reporting form, ethics templates), under CC BY-SA 4.0. The results of all workshops will be published together as a single open-access dataset — the collective corpus of imaginaries, free for the community to use.

Partnership

The initiative begins with a small group of coordinators and grows with every researcher who joins:

• Séverin Lemaignan and Raquel Ros: IIIA-CSIC, Spain
• AJung Moon: McGill University, Canada
• Ilaria Torre: Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
• Yolande Strengers: Monash University, Australia

Expected Impact

• For people: to feel safe today, in the face of robots arriving.
• For design: a shared grounding for designing desirable futures with robots, on a ten-year horizon.
• For the field: challenging the view of robots as obedient servitors with superhuman powers — and building alternatives in its place.

Join the initiative — run a workshop, download the workshop kit, or write to us.