Designing Personal Embodied Agents with Personas

We are exploring strategies for designing novel robots, or more generally, personal embodied agents. The motivation is to open up the design space for robots in everyday environments, while at the same time grounding new designs in existing human interests. We have modified established methods from the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). First, we investigated specific human interests, in this case in exotic pets, to understand and design for possible interests of future robot owners. Based on the data from interviews with pet owners, we developed four fictive characters, so called personas. Each persona has a specific interest in robots as personal embodied agents, which has a particular form, role and behaviour. From the resulting personas we derived a number of possible designs, where the agents take on different roles in peoples' everyday activities.