The increasing deployment of robots in urban spaces calls for design strategies to ensure their adaptation and to mitigate potential disruptions to complex urban contexts. Our research aims to initiate the discussion of contextual adaptability issues of urban robots by exploring everyday scenarios where their presence would appear out of place. We created a design probe for people to carry in their daily lives, facilitating them to envision the robot's presence and capture scenarios where a robot seems to be disruptive. We collected data by distributing the probes among the research team and conducting a city walk activity using the probe at a workshop. This paper presents factors arising from the collected scenarios, encompassing temporal, spatial, cultural, and social dynamics, as well as various stakeholders that robots need to adapt to. These findings provide a blueprint and potential research directions for future research into robot contextual adaptability in urban environments.

Design fixation, a phenomenon describing designers' adherence to pre-existing ideas or concepts that constrain design outcomes, is particularly prevalent in human-robot interaction (HRI), for example, due to collectively held and stabilised imaginations of what a robot should look like or behave. In this paper, we explore the contribution of creative AI tools to overcome design fixation and enhance creative processes in HRI design. In a four weeks long design exploration, we used generative text-to-image models to ideate and visualise robotic artefacts and robot sociotechnical imaginaries. We exchanged results along with reflections through a digital postcard format. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach to imagining novel robot concepts, surfacing existing assumptionsand robot stereotypes, and situating robotic artefacts in context.We discuss the contribution to designerly HRI practices and conclude with lessons learnt for using creative AI tools as an emerging design practice in HRI research and beyond.

We propose a workshop stemming from ongoing conversations about the role of design methods and designed artefacts within the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Given the growing interest in understanding what the field can learn from design explorations, the workshop focuses on hands-on annotating activity where participants (researchers and practitioners from HRI, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design Research) will analyze and reflect upon selected collections of robotic artefacts. Ultimate goal of the workshop is to explicate values, concepts and perspectives that usually remain tacitly embedded in the designed artefacts and, as such, hard to appreciate as proper HRI contributions. The expected outcome of the workshop is a set of methodological recommendations and concrete examples of what kind of knowledge can be generated through robotic artefacts.