Approaching Future Robot Technologies via Speculative Role-Playing

Playful research approaches have become more popular in Human- Robot Interaction (HRI). In this paper, a tabletop role-playing game is introduced as a means to explore future robot technologies in a playful, immersive and human-centred approach. The trial study included four participants with expertise in HRI or care technolo- gies to elicit novel application opportunities for robots in home environments. Creating a fictional character as part of the gameplay enabled participants to immerse themselves in their characters and opened up a narrative speculative design space. The gameplay re- sulted in a deep immersion of the participants and provided insights into potential (robot) technologies supporting daily life activities. All technologies mentioned by participants were collected in a mind map, and from the mind map four fictional robots were created. The fictional robots were also created into a design fiction card deck as a tangible prop to utilize in a future game study.


INTRODUCTION
Building novel technologies usually starts with an idea.However, when it comes to imagining robot technologies, we seem to be stuck on what kind of technologies that might be and how interactions might look like, as expectations are often shaped by depictions of robot technologies in media [3].
In this paper, we introduce a novel method to playfully explore potential futures and future technologies by utilizing a role-playing approach where the participants get immersed in a fctional character.When it comes to role-playing, the aspect of immersing the participants into a specifc mindset and character is still challenging [2].In our approach, we include the creation of a fctional character as part of the gameplay session instead of using a Persona and immerse participants in the daily life of a fctional character in depth.
The introduced role-playing approach aims to open up a speculative design space exploring potential future technologies aiding the created characters with daily life activities while simultaneously drawing on the participants' expertise in HRI and care technologies.
This report provides a short overview of role-playing approaches in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and HRI.We then introduce our character sheet and elaborate on the gameplay.Lastly, we present our main insights regarding the method, emerging themes from the transcribed gameplay sessions and introduce four fctional robots based on future robot technologies mentioned during the gameplay.

RELATED WORK
Recently, role-playing approaches have become more popular to explore futures and future technologies.For instance, in [5], a liveaction role-playing (larp) workshop was introduced as an embodied design research method in HCI.The workshop had two aims: to sensitize designers to perspectives and situations far from their own and to test potential design prototypes that could be deployed in those situations.Another example is by Lengyel et al. [4], who introduce a tabletop role-playing game workshop set in a sustainable future with a focus on overcoming stereotypes and stereotypical thinking about older adults.Further, Boess et al. [1] point out that "role playing can be a discoursive tool within design that promotes attentiveness to social change [1, p.279]".In their paper, they introduce multiple role-playing exercises they conducted over the years aiming to enable participants to refect in-depth about the design exercises and resulting in discussion of the interactions they experienced through role-play.They also point out the potential for innovating on interaction by exploring actions departing from social norms through acting out and role-playing.
In HRI, Collins and Šabanović [2] have already tapped into the potential of role-playing games as a means to explore desired features of a social robot assisting people with depression.Part of the gameplay is a character sheet including characteristics of people living with depression, a companion sheet including the robot's abilities and sensors, and a map of the home environment.The participants are playing through a day in the life of a character living with depression and fnding ways to support their character in daily life activities with features of a social robot.In the study, participants reported that it was challenging to get into the mindset of a character living with depression.Thus, at the beginning, the participants designed the social robot towards their own needs and later revised the design towards their character's needs, which points to the potential role-playing has at sensitizing participants towards the needs of vulnerable groups, an aspect also pointed out by Márquez Segura et al. [5].
Looking at play in a broader sense, it can be a means of exploring futures and future technologies entangled with reality today.For instance, Thibault [9] draws from the works of Juri Lotman and points out that play is a means of creating a "sandbox" and safely exploring aspects of the real world and life in a safe setting."Thus, playing involves creating of a model of reality, which translates some of the characteristics of the real world into a system of rules.[9, p.299]" Similarly, Ortoleva [6] points out that inventing alternative worlds and creating fantastic scenarios are opportunities to explore aspects of the real world and real life playfully and safely.Although the fantasy created is often interpreted as a way to escape reality and create distance from everyday life, it also creates a space of possibilities as fctional worlds connect back to the real world and life.It is a playful way of exploring potential futures and future technologies without experiencing the consequences of decisions made.Utilizing play and introducing playful elements as a research method might provide a diferent angle and perspective to explore futures and future (robot) technologies.
Relating to Ortolova [6], the understanding and application of play and playfulness is shifting, "a movement of trespassing [6, p.7]", towards exploring aspects of what is real, serious, and tangible in real life through play.
Playful approaches can also be utilized to open up the design space towards vulnerable participants.For instance, Swinnen and de Medeiros [8] explored play in the form of creative approaches and art with people living with dementia.
However, there is also the issue of creating games and playful approaches which fail vulnerable participants' needs.In their paper addressing the purpose of play, Spiel and Gerling [7] emphazise that the neurodivergent participants' needs get overlooked, overpowered and misconceptualized because studies are often designed in a top-down approach from an external point of view.Thus, designing playful research interactions is a challenging task and needs a lot of sensibility, knowledge, and an inclusive environment.

METHOD
The study aimed to nudge experts in HRI and care technologies towards exploring novel care technologies in a home environment through an immersive role-playing approach.Drawing inspiration from tabletop role-playing games, the materials included a character sheet, a 20-sided and a 3-sided dice, a game board, and sticky notes in diferent colours and shapes.

The Character Sheet
The character sheet was inspired by the character sheets often used in role-playing games (RPGs).In RPGs, a playable character with strengths, weaknesses, and other characteristics is created before starting a new adventure.The character sheet was created based on publicly available statistical data, and most characteristics were decided via the random element of rolling a 20-sided dice.The conductor of the study has an answer sheet on which the characteristics are mapped to the range 1 to 20, representing the 20-sided dice.
Building on the idea of creating a character as part of the gameplay, the characteristics introduced on the character sheet were chosen with a focus on the character's living situation and health.Attributes included a name, age (15-91), gender (female, male, trans/nonbinary/other), migration background, educational level (4 options), occupation (free choice), and employment.The section Living Situation covered aspects like living alone, with partners or family, living in a house or apartment, rented or not rented.The Health section was divided into Sports, Chronic Illness(es), Pain Intensity, and Restrictions in Daily Life.The focus on (dis)abilities was intentional, as the character sheet aimed to create a character highly likely to use care technologies in their daily life.The character sheet also included blank space for the participant to make notes (link to the character sheet).

Gameplay
The gameplay adhered to the following structure: (1) Create a character using the character sheet.
(2) Create a typical day in the character's life using the blank game board and putting sticky notes at specifc times their character does something.(3) Ask the participant how they feel about knowing their character.If the character's day is still vague to the participant, follow up with playing through a typical day in the character's life (optional step).(4) Make a time jump ten years into the future and adapt the character sheet with a diferent coloured pen.There are two options: (1) let the participant adapt the character sheet as they wish, or ( 2) let them roll the 20-sided dice again to adapt the attributes on the character sheet.( 5) With the adapted character, start playing through one or multiple days of the character's life ten years in the future.(6) To give the participant more incentive to explore care technology, one day is played as a "sick day" ten years in the future.
The crucial step of the gameplay is jumping ten years into the future to open up design space for future technologies.As the created character ages ten years, there will be changes in some aspects of their life, e.g., worsening of their physical or mental health.One participant included the death of the created character's partner, while another extended the imaginary scenario by including lifethreatening climate changes into the gameplay.
The game session was followed up with a short interview, including questions regarding the character sheet and gameplay experience, followed by questions regarding the fctional technologies mentioned during the gameplay session.Lastly, the participants were asked about fctional technologies from an expert's perspective and what a positive-and negative-co-notated future regarding technologies might entail.

Data Collection and Evaluation
Four one-on-one game sessions were conducted with two participants with expertise in HRI and two participants with expertise in care and assistive technologies.The gameplay session lasted between 1 and 2 hours.The collected data included audio recordings of the play session, pictures of the flled-in character sheet and game board with the daily routine.The audio recording was transcribed word-by-word by hand without using any transcription tools.The transcripts were printed out and coded by hand in two rounds.
The frst coding round was conducted by reading the transcripts on paper and marking interesting sections and aspects.A second round focused on all kinds of technologies mentioned by the participants during the gameplay.This included existing technologies like smartphones, TVs, kitchen devices the characters used in their daily lives and potential future technologies the participants introduced.The three codes "existing technology", "using technology", and "potential/future technology" were used in the second round.
From the codes related to technologies, mind maps were created for each game session, introducing the structure of "existing technology", "using technology" and "potential/future technology" from the codes and including all the ideas mentioned in the game sessions.Next, the mind maps from the game sessions were merged, keeping the three introduced categories (link to the mind maps of all three categories).In the merged mind maps, all ideas featuring robots were marked in bold (link to the mind map potential/future technology).

Positionality Statement
I (frst author) am a 36-year-old white woman living in central Europe and in the early stage of my PhD.In my work, I focus on reimagining robotic technologies in the care context through playful, participatory design approaches that will hopefully strive towards meaningful and desired outcomes.I constantly refect on my biases and work towards recognizing and understanding how they shape my research.

KEY INSIGHTS 4.1 Methodological Insights
The character sheet worked well as a tool to immerse the participants in the gameplay and, specifcally, the created character's life.While playing the game, three out of four participants used the frst person "I" to play their character most of the time.They expressed emotions, likes, and dislikes while playing, added further details regarding family and activities, and adapted behavior and hobbies when the ten-year time jump and worsening health made things (more) difcult or no longer feasible for their character.Two participants expressed worries about their character because they lived alone.
It is important to leave gaps for the participants to fll in.For instance, some characteristics like occupation, envisioning what the house or fat looks like, or the character's family background are intentionally left blank so the participant can decide and shape the character to their liking.Another gap for the participants to fll was the game board and the possibility of freely creating a daily structure for their character using sticky notes.
The coherence of narration and the created character's life story was essential to all participants.They revised their narration to achieve coherence if some aspects did not ft the character or the backstory.Sometimes, participants dropped out of character when they were unsure if an aspect ftted the character.For example, participants said "I am not sure if she would like to use something like that [technology]."or "I am not sure if going swimming is something he would do.",switching from I (for the character) to third person when dropping out of character.
However, immersing the participants into a fctional character also lead to the main limitation.Playing a fctional character and exploring technologies from their character's point of view resulted in only including technologies that ft their character's lifestyle, e.g., for one participant's character a microwave was a novel technology entering their kitchen.So, even if more advanced technologies existed in the imaginary world the participants would not mention these during the gameplay.

Insights on Fictional Robot Technologies
The narrative approach proved well-suited to create design fctions of future technologies including (care) robot applications in home environments.Although not all fctional robots introduce novel functionalities, the participants made sensible technological decisions when introducing these technologies in their characters' lives focusing on providing care and improving well-being.
Based on the introduced robot technologies collected in the mind map, four fctional robots (see Fig. 2) were created by the author to convey the ideas in a more tangible way and open up a design space: Companio is a stationary social robot put on the table or a shelf.The primary mode of interaction is via verbal commands, and its purpose is to keep someone company and converse with them, as well as motivate people to do activities like meeting friends or BuildBot is a do-it-yourself robot building kit.The robot is disassembled in a package but is functional enough to remind the person building the robot at what stage the building process is.Building the robot is also intended as a social activity, including other parties, like family members or friends.Also, programming the robot is part of the experience.
MultiBot is a household robot that helps with multiple activities like making and serving tea, collecting and cleaning dishes, or helping with gardening work like planting and watering fowers.It can move indoors and outdoors and assist the owner with repetitive activities and chores.
Keyohe is a robot to keep a person healthy.It has a built-in temperature sensor and cooling unit that can be turned on when it gets too hot.It detects sleep issues and functions as a personal ftness trainer.Keyohe is an acronym created by using the frst two letters of the robot's aim: keep you healthy.
The four fctional robots were also visualized (see Fig. 2), and a design fction card deck was created to be used in a future study aiming at provoking and eliciting more (novel) robot design fctions.The cards introduce fctional interactions with the fctional robots.

Additional Themes Introduced by the Participants
During the coding, some aspects the participants introduced into the gameplay emerged and were formed into themes.For instance, the importance of family members as helpers and supporters for the created characters.Also, in two play sessions destructive aspects of climate change were introduced as part of the world-building.Further, all participants mentioned the issue of afordability of technology as care technologies are often expensive.

DISCUSSION, LIMITATIONS, AND FUTURE WORK
Utilizing a role-playing approach to explore aspects of health, care, and technology in a playful future setting proved suitable to gain insight towards possible applications of robots supporting daily life activities.The character sheet is a valuable tool to immerse the participants in the fctional character's life, and overcoming the challenge of getting into the mindset of a fctional character as participants reported in [2].Further, utilizing the role-playing approach resulted in narrative fction of future care and robot technologies by drawing on the participants' expertise through immersed gameplay.
Exploring future technologies through narration also introduced some difculties.For instance, participants only mentioned technologies when these ft their created character's lifestyle, even if the technologies existed in their fctional world.An alternative approach that avoids relying solely on a character as a focal point may be worth considering to discover more novel design fctions of care technologies.Thus, tapping on the potential of play as a "sandbox" [9] and world-building [6] to explore and elicit future robot technologies might be a promising approach.
There is also the issue of power imbalances when creating games in a top-down approach [7].Although some aspects of the character sheet and game board were intentionally left blank for the participant to decide and shape the fctional character and gameplay experience the materials were still created from a top-down view.Further, there is also the issue of unintentially biasing the participants while guiding them through the gameplay by using suggestive words like "robot" instead of "techhnology".
There are some additional limitations to the study that need to be addressed.The low number of participants limits the study results and might introduce a biased view of future robot technologies.Also, selecting participants with a specifc background introduces another source of bias in the study.During the analysis of the transcripts, some future technologies might have been missed by the frst author or interpreted diferently than intended by the participants.Finally, by creating visual representations of the fctional robots, there is also the issue of reproducing (visual) stereotypes and reducing a robot to its visible features and functionalities.
In the future, we plan to utilize the fctional robots to explore more aspects of robot technologies in a playful setting aiming at provoking and eliciting more novel robot design fctions.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: A flled-in game board with the daily structure of one of the created characters.

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Depictions of the four fctional robots created by the author based on robot technologies mentioned during the gameplay session.From left to right: Copanio, BuildBot, MultiBot and Keyohe.