CfD Conversations 03

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CFD Conversation Series: Design for Collaborative Robotic Environments

Robotic systems and devices are becoming ever more pervasive in our workplace environments. Rather than being machines that force their modalities of operation upon workers the promise is to create responsive systems that adjust and adapt their operations to human practices, supporting the emergence of new forms of work. A panel, curated by CfD faculty member Kristian Kloeckl (Art + Design, Architecture) looks at profound questions that arise as designers, architects, engineers and developers find new ways to address the emerging condition of collaborative robotic environments.

CfD Faculty Curator
Kristian Kloeckl Associate Professor, Director Experience Design Lab, Department of Design, School of Architecture, Northeastern University	Kristian Kloeckl is Designer and Associate Professor at Northeastern University’s Department of Art + Design and the School of Architecture, coordinating the design graduate programs and directing the Experience Design Lab. His work probes the boundaries of experience interaction design in the context of today’s hybrid cities and investigates the role of performance-based and improvisational frameworks for design. Kloeckl is a PI for ongoing NSF-supported research on design for human-robot collaboration, author of “The Urban Improvise: Improvisation-Based Design for Hybrid Cities” (Yale University Press), and co-editor of “Workplace and Public Realm”. His work has been exhibited at Venice Biennale, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Vienna MAK, the Singapore Art Museum and he is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Montreal World Design Summit, Hybrid City Conference, Platform Strategy Executive Symposium at MIT Media Lab, World Bank SDN Forum, Red Dot Design Museum Singapore, Austrian Innovation Forum, ICA Conference Taipei, and eGov Global Exchange Singapore. Kloeckl received his Masters degree in Industrial Design from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy and his PhD in Product and Communication Design from the University IUAV of Venice.
The Panelists
Keith Evan Green Professor, Director Architectural Robotics Lab, Department of Design + Environmental Analysis, Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University	Keith Evan Green is a full professor at Cornell University in Human Centered Design, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, and Information Science. Green’s Architectural Robotics Lab investigates a new frontier in human-machine interaction: meticulously designed, increasingly intelligent, cyber-physical environments that support and augment us at work, school, and home, as we roam, interconnect, and age. In architectural robotics, computation is embedded in the physical fabric of our living environments, manifested as robotic devices, furniture, and rooms. With support from NSF as Principal Investigator, Green and his ARL teams generate new vocabularies of design and new understanding of human-machine interaction in the spatial realm. In addition to numerous ACM and IEEE publications, Green’s book Architectural Robotics: Ecosystems of Bits, Bytes and Biology (MIT Press, 2016) defines this emerging field. A registered architect and Senior Member of IEEE, Green earned B.A., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Arch. from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Daniel Cardoso Llach Associate Professor, Co-Director CodeLab, School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University	Daniel Cardoso Llach is Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. His work explores issues ranging from social and cultural aspects of automation in design and construction, the politics of representation and participation in software, and new methods to understand design as a socio-technical phenomenon. He is the author of publications, exhibitions, and technologies — including the book Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design — addressing these topics, and has been supported by the Graham Foundation, Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and Google’s Artists + Machine Intelligence program, among others. Daniel is a 2021-22 Pennsylvania Manufacturing Fellow; has been a research fellow at Leuphana (MECS), Germany, and a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, UK; and holds a PhD and a MS (with honors) from MIT and a professional degree in architecture from Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá.
Taskin Padir Associate Professor, Director Institute for Experiential Robotics, College of Engineering, Northeastern University	Taskin Padir is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University. He received his PhD and MS degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University. He is the Director of Robotics and Intelligent Vehicles Research Laboratory (RIVeR Lab). He is also the Founding Director of the Institute for Experiential Robotics at Northeastern. His research interests – include supervised autonomy for humanoid robots, shared autonomy for intelligent vehicles, and human-in-the-loop control systems with applications in exploration, disaster response, personalized in-home care, and nuclear decommissioning.