Congratulations to Victor Tuan Vu Pham on receiving a Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2026!
Victor´s paper, co-authored with Judith Dörrenbächer, HRI-EU associate Thomas Weißwange, and Marc Hassenzahl, asks a simple question: Does it matter who owns the robot in the room?
In a vignette study with 225 participants, Victor and his colleagues showed that robot ownership has an effect on how people experience group dynamics.
A robot nodding along to a group discussion was seen as collaborative and socially close when owned by the participant or the group collectively. In contrast, the same behavior was perceived as more distant and manipulative when the robot belonged to an active speaker.
The takeaway: Ownership is a social signal that subtly reorganizes perceived power, trust, and cohesion in human–robot groups. Thus, interactions designers need to take a small design choice like framing of ownership into account: Making ownership visible can support more predictable group experiences.
