A Robot Among People:From Social Imitation to the Social Becoming of Human Groups

2026-09-11

AI Summary

论文提出将机器人视为共享环境中的元素，通过促进群体间的互动和理解来增强团队凝聚力，而非模仿人类社交或解决具体问题。

Abstract

Robots designed to mediate human groups often fall into the solutionist trap: they are framed as sociable agents that fix problems such as conflict, disengagement, or lack of coordination. We suggest a different way of thinking. Rather than discrete agents, robots can be understood as situated elements of shared environments; catalysts and carriers of group experience whose meaning emerges through how people position, interpret, and interact with them. From this perspective, robots are not there to repair some ostensible dysfunctionality, but to enable group-level sense-making around care, norms, and identity. Our prior work on robotic street furniture suggests that this does not happen by imitating human sociality but by taking the shape of deliberately constrained, group-facing entities that happen and act for \textit{us} without being socially entangled as one of us. We thus understand robots in public spaces not in terms of autonomy or intelligence, but as a relational capacity. This implies designing robots not in our image or for our utility, but grounded in our needs in being and becoming together.

Problem

• Robots
• Social Imitation
• Group Experience
• Sense-Making
• Shared Environments

Innovation

• shared environments
• catalysts and carriers of group experience
• relational capacity