Satomi Sugiyama, Franklin University Switzerland, Switzerland
The purpose of this paper is twofold; Firstly, it seeks to consider interaction patterns that people expect from robots in everyday life. Secondly, it explores emerging symbolic meanings of social robots by revisiting the theory of Apparatgeist (Katz & Aakhus, 2002), which was originally developed to analyze the emerging communication patterns of mobile communication. In this endeavor, the present paper focuses on one of the well-known consumer social robots, Pepper, and how people are reacting to its/his presence in Japanese public places as observed in the social media Twitter. Ultimately, the paper seeks to illuminate a future design direction of social robots that can co-exist, co-present, or even co-habit with humans.
