Bow Ties & Colorful Eyes: Centering Youth Designs of Social Robots

Abstract

Under UNICEF’s Policy guidance on AI for children, child-centered AI should always ‘ensure inclusion of and for children.’ To spotlight youth visions for robots, we led co-design workshops with children between 5-14 years old. Youth designs were expressive, customized, relatable, and approachable. Based on 54 drawings and descriptions of the social robot Haru, we suggest that future child-centered robots should 1) be expressive across verbal and non-verbal channels of communication, 2) allow for customization to give children more agency when interacting with the robot, 3) adapt to children’s style and hobbies to make them feel seen, and 4) aesthetically keep proportions of robot faces consistent and cartoon-like to make robots more approachable.