Co-Creation with Social Robots

Social interactions during co-creation can be both a blessing and a curse: while some interactions might inspire, others might stymie creative thought. Social robots, autonomous systems developed to communicate with humans in a natural way, can possibly be designed to support co-creation by harnessing the positives of social interaction while reducing the negatives. One can, for example, envision a scenario where robots are designed to inspire while also being programmed to achieve a psychologically safe environment where people feel free to openly share their thoughts. Social robots, however, are clearly not human beings. Rather, these machines tend to be perceived as something in between a technological object and something human-like. This raises questions about whether and how co-creating with social robots skews known effects of social interactions among humans on co-creation (e.g., social feedback, emotional contagion, perceived intelligence), or whether these known effects will simply replicate when interacting with social robots. In this 10-minute presentation we report on the outcomes of a recent series of human-robot interaction experiments we conducted that 1) investigate the impact of perceived robot identity, compared to perceived human identity, on human-robot co-creation and facilitation; and 2) investigate whether the aforementioned known influences that affect co-creation between humans, similarly affect co-creation between social robots and humans. The findings provide insight into the future potential of social robots for supporting co-creation - and raise questions that merit further discussion about whether and how this development should be pursued, due to its potential impact on the creative industry.