Modularity as Accommodation: How Families Negotiate One Shared Domestic Robot in Co-Design

Abstract

Domestic robots are increasingly imagined as long-term inhabitants of the home, yet most current design framings still assume a single intended user. Real households, however, are shared by multiple co-residents whose routines, values, and expectations are simultaneous but not always aligned. We report a card-based co-design workshop with four households in which family members first drew their ideal domestic robot individually in response to the same scenario cards, and then collaboratively produced one shared robot drawing. Although the prompt cards contained no modular cues, participants repeatedly escribed robots through reversible presence, separable functions, and detachable or distributed parts when trying to accommodate multiple household members’ needs. We offer this late-breaking work as a sensitizing concept and design provocation for domestic HRI: if homes are plural, modularity may matter not only as reconfigurable hardware, but also as a way to ask how one shared robot might accommodate multiple household members without erasing their differences.