Abstract
Social robot morphologies are not conceived in a void but build on cultural trajectories of artifact design that precede them. We suggest three design tropes that are predominant in many robots morphological design choices: the human replica, the futuristic machine, and the cute companion. We discuss the first two of these tropes in the context of their historical origins, and the third from a contemporary lens. For all three, we present cultural implications of the aesthetic typologies to emphasize the critical importance of conscious engagement with these contexts when designing social robots.
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Dunstan, B.J., Hoffman, G. (2023). Social Robot Morphology: Cultural Histories of Robot Design. In: Dunstan, B.J., Koh, J.T.K.V., Turnbull Tillman, D., Brown, S.A. (eds) Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and Their Emergent Cultural Ecologies. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28138-9_2
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