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About

David Sirkin is a human-robot interaction (HRI) researcher whose work sits at the intersection of robot design, social behavior, and real-world deployment. He is best known for pioneering studies of everyday service robots — most notably his "Mechanical Ottoman" (2015, 145 citations) and robotic trash barrel projects (2015, 71 citations) — which placed autonomous robots in naturalistic public settings to uncover the unspoken social protocols governing human-robot encounters. These studies revealed how robots must not only navigate physical spaces but actively negotiate approach, initiation, and legibility with bystanders. Sirkin's research also advances telepresence robotics, demonstrating that consistency between physical and on-screen movement meaningfully improves user experience (2012, 69 citations). His more recent work broadens the field's ambitions: "The Forgotten in HRI" (2020, 50 citations) urges researchers to move beyond lab studies toward real-world contexts, while "Fake It to Make It" (2021, 49 citations) champions exploratory prototyping as a foundational design methodology. Running throughout his career is a commitment to embodied, improvisational design methods that surface tacit knowledge early in the creative process. Together, his contributions have shaped how researchers think about robots as social actors embedded in everyday human life.