@inproceedings {pub6617,
	title = {Robots are Us: From Acting Social to the Social Becoming of Human Groups},
	author = {Tuan Vu Pham AND Judith D{\"o}rrenb{\"a}cher AND Thomas H Weisswange AND Marc Hassenzahl},
	year = {2026},
	month = {April},
	abstract = {Robots designed to mediate human groups often fall into the solu-
tionist trap: they are framed as sociable agents that fix problems
such as conflict, disengagement, or lack of coordination. We sug-
gest a different way of thinking. Robots should be understood as
catalysts and agitators of new group experiences; artifacts whose
meaning emerges through how groups position, interpret, and in-
teract with them collectively. From this perspective, robots are
not there to repair some ostensible dysfunctionality, but to enable
group-level sense-making around care, norms, and identity. Our
prior work suggests that this does not happen by imitating human
sociality but by taking the shape of deliberately constrained, group-
facing entities that happen and act for us without being socially
entangled as one of us. We thus consider robotness in groups not as
autonomy or intelligence, but as a relational capacity. This implies
designing robots not in our image or for our utility, but grounded
in our relational needs in being and becoming together.},
	publisher = {https://sites.google.com/view/whatisachirobot},
	url = {https://sites.google.com/view/whatisachirobot},
	booktitle = {44th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026): Workshop "Everything Is a Robot (and Nothing Is)"},
	city = {Barcelona, Spain}
}