Come on in!: A strategic way to intend approachability to a space by using motions of a robotic partition

Interactive space has been suggested as a future direction for architectural development on the basis of technological advances, and the design factors that affect the user experience of space thus need to be explored. Motion is one of the critical means of affective expression for facial-constrained and verbal-constrained robots such as functional robots. This paper introduces an interactive robotic partition that recognizes a person around it and reacts to the person by expressing physical motions. Using the robotic partition, we conducted a 7 (type of motions: moving toward, moving away, expanding, contracting, incurving, outcurving, and trembling) × 2 (user perspective: approaching to the partition vs. sitting inside the partition) within-participants experiment (N = 28). Participants showed higher approachability to the space and greater preference for incurving and expanding motions than trembling motion. The results also showed an interaction effect between motion and user perspective. When the partition expressed moving toward and expanding motions, participants in a sitting perspective reported higher approachability and greater preference than participants with an approaching perspective whereas opposite results were revealed when the partition showed moving toward and contracting motions. Implications for design are discussed.