Design for Serendipitous Interaction: BubbleBot - Bringing People Together with Bubbles

Abstract

Fast-paced contemporary life full of planned interaction usually makes people miss out on wonderful moments. We here present BubbleBot, a speculative robot designed to support serendipity of interactions in public space. After observations in public spaces and embodied design workshops, we have designed BubbleBot to be a peripheral public-space robot, bursting bubbles at passersby to invite serendipitous interactions. BubbleBot is a speculative robot to create magical moments among people with minimal peripheral social interaction. With this project, we aim at generating a conversation about the future roles and interaction paradigms of robots in public space.