The Unboxing Experience: Exploration and Design of Initial Interactions Between Children and Social Robots
Open accessAbstract
Social robots are increasingly introduced into children’s lives as educational and social companions, yet little is known about how these products might best be introduced to their environments. The emergence of the “unboxing” phenomenon in media suggests that introduction is key to technology adoption where initial impressions are made. To better understand this phenomenon toward designing a positive unboxing experience in the context of social robots for children, we conducted three field studies with families of children aged 8 to 13: (1) an exploratory free-play activity (n = 12); (2) a co-design session (n = 11) that informed the development of a prototype box and a curated unboxing experience; and (3) a user study (n = 9) that evaluated children’s experiences. Our findings suggest the unboxing experience of social robots can be improved through the design of a creative aesthetic experience that engages the child socially to guide initial interactions and foster a positive child-robot relationship.
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Social robots can facilitate rich interactions that support children's cognitive and emotional development in the physical world.
“and that social robots can facilitate rich interactions that support children's cognitive and emotional development in the physical world [2, 34, 42, 44, 47].”
From SET-PAiREd: Designing for Parental Involvement in Learning with an AI-Assisted Educational Robot (2025) · cites this paper as [44]
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References 46 · Cited by 46
Research works printed but not linked: 3
- Victoria Clarke and Virginia Braun. 2014. Thematic analysis. In Encyclopedia of critical psychology. Springer, 1947-1952.
- Eric C Deng, Bilge Mutlu, and Maja J Matarić. 2018. Formalizing the design space and product development cycle for socially interactive robots. In Workshop on Social Robots in the Wild at the 2018 ACM Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).
- Takayuki Kanda, Takayuki Hirano, Daniel Eaton, and Hiroshi Ishiguro. 2004. Interactive Robots as Social Partners and Peer Tutors for Children: A Field Trial. Human Computer Interaction (Special issues on human-robot interaction) 19 (06 2004), 61-84. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327051hci1901&2_4 · DOI
- Authors
- Lee, C. P., Cagiltay, B., & Mutlu, B.
- Affiliations
- University of Wisconsin–Madison (US)
- Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States
- Venue
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2022-04-27
- Pages
- 1-14
- OpenAlex
- W4221165499
- Cited by
- 46
- References
- 46
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 2
- FWCI
- 17.33
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (DRL-1906854)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Keywords
- social robots, children, initial interaction, technology adoption, aesthetic design, co-design, educational robots, social companions
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