Abstract

This paper investigates what it might look like for a robot to work with a human on a need-finding design task using an affinity diagram. Designers use affinity diagrams to make sense of unstructured information by clustering notes on a work surface; to explore human-robot collaboration in this sensemaking activity, the authors developed HIRO, an autonomous robot that constructs affinity diagrams with humans. In a within-subjects study, 56 participants affinity-diagrammed themes from real-world user-research quotes once alone and once with HIRO.