Animated Public Furniture as an Interaction Mediator: Engaging Passersby In-the-Wild with Robotic Benches

2026-03-30

AI Summary

This study explores how dynamic public furniture can actively foster social interaction among pedestrians. To this end, the authors design a robotic bench capable of autonomous movement and reconfiguration within semi-outdoor urban spaces and propose an Affordance Transition Model (ATM) that elucidates the mechanism by which the bench dynamically shifts among robotic, spatial, and infrastructural affordances to guide social engagement. The system integrates a mobile platform, environmental sensing, and behavioral animation control to enable real-time responsiveness to contextual cues. Field experiments demonstrate that the robotic bench effectively activates, redistributes, and stabilizes pedestrian participation, offering both a novel medium and a theoretical framework for urban human-robot interaction.

Abstract

Urban HCI investigates how digital technologies shape human behaviour within the social, spatial, temporal dynamics of public space. Meanwhile, robotic furniture research demonstrates how the purposeful animation of mundane utilitarian elements can influence human behaviour in everyday contexts. Taken together, these strands highlight an untapped opportunity to investigate how animated public furniture could mediate social interaction in urban environments. In this paper, we present the design process and in-the-wild study of mobile robotic benches that reconfigure with a semi-outdoor public space. Our findings show that the gestural performance of the benches manifested three affordances perceived by passersby, they activated engagement as robots, redistributed engagement as spatial elements, and settled engagement as infrastructure. We proposed an Affordance Transition Model (ATM) describing how robotic furniture could proactively facilitate transition between these affordances to engage passersby. Our study bridges robotic furniture and urban HCI to activate human experience with the built environment purposefully.

Problem

• Animated Public Furniture
• Urban HCI
• Robotic Benches
• Social Interaction
• Affordance

Innovation

• Animated Public Furniture
• Robotic Benches
• Affordance Transition Model
• Urban HCI
• In-the-Wild Study