RfH 2025: Robots for Humans: Empowerment Through Co-Creative and Social Robots! IEEE RO-MAN 2025 Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, August 29, 2025

The promise of having personal social robots in people’s everyday lives brings a technological, but also sociological, transformation. Researchers need to address complex technical challenges to allow co-robots to autonomously experience people’s environments and interact accordingly. Moreover, different issues have to be addressed as well regarding the role that such co-robots will take on in every aspect of human life. For instance, what makes these machines social? And is their perception as social agents desirable? What dimensions and scales of social life do they cover? Particularly, we are interested in exploring the social robots’ role of empowerment for people.

For example, how can social robots empower humans by augmenting rather than replacing human creativity? This hands-on workshop invites participants to explore new concepts in HRI, looking at the role of social robots in creative domains. The full-day program includes expert keynote speakers, participant poster sessions, and a dynamic co-creative design sprint. Together, we’ll explore timely challenges and opportunities, such as the lack of design guidelines for empowerment and the potential of social robots in creative collaboration. Through an interactive co-creative design sprint, we will engage in a structured process of mapping, sketching, storyboarding, (experiential) prototyping, and discussion.

The workshop offers the opportunity to experiment, connect, and shape the future of HRI to researchers, designers, artists, and developers. Desired outcomes cover social robotics in the direction of designing robots for empowerment and co-creativity, insights into how HRI design choices affect the interaction, socialness, and outcomes on empowerment, and co-creativity. The workshop will conclude with a panel discussion to synthesize findings and discuss general issues related to the role and perception of social robots, working towards guidelines for the design of social robots for creative empowerment.