@inproceedings {pub6352,
	title = {Mediating Urban Social Encounters {\textendash} Co-Design of Robotic Street Furniture with Adolescents },
	author = {Judith D{\"o}rrenb{\"a}cher AND Tuan Vu Pham AND Thomas H Weisswange AND Alarith Uhde AND Anna Hoch AND Marc Hassenzahl},
	year = {2026},
	month = {April},
	abstract = {As social interaction continues to shift into digital spaces, spontaneous encounters in public have become untrained and increasingly challenging {\textendash} particularly for adolescents. This study explores how robotic street furniture can facilitate and mediate such encounters. In a focus group and a theater-based co-design workshop, fourteen adolescents envisioned and enacted ten speculative concepts that encourage social interaction, such as roaming benches inviting serendipity. Our analysis identified diverse robotic roles, strengths, and weaknesses (e.g., robotic referee: objective yet insistent) as well as eight design strategies (e.g., robot-orchestrated {\textquotedblleft}coincidences{\textquotedblright} for memorable encounters, robotic imperfection to invite reflection). The study further surfaced ethical concerns around transparency and control in Human{\textendash}Human{\textendash}Robot Interaction, as well as the methodological challenge of facilitating embodied ideation while avoiding solutionism. We argue that robots, precisely because of their non-human qualities, can act as situated urban actors that foster social encounters {\textendash} yet their design requires careful consideration.},
	publisher = {ACM},
	booktitle = {44th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026)},
	city = {Barcelona, Spain}
}