In March 2025, Alex Binh Vinh Duc Nguyen from Research[x]Design at KU Leuven travelled to Australia to share his work on the SONATA project.
On March 5th, he presented his paper “Eliciting Understandable Architectonic Gestures for Robotic Furniture through Co-Design Improvisation” at the premier ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference (HRI’ 25) in Melbourne, which ran from the 4th-6th March.
The paper explores how adaptive architecture, embodied as a mobile robotic partition, can autonomously gesture towards occupants through its motion and position to convey its intent when autonomously reconfiguring a layout, or even to nudge occupants in relocating to a more suitable location. To design these gestures, the team at Research[x]Design, collaborated with a diverse group of multidisciplinary experts, including animators, choreographers, cinematographers, scenographers, architects, and roboticists.
The link to the full paper is here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3721488.3721560
While in Melbourne, Alex took the chance to visit the HCI and robotic labs at Monash University and CSIRO: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia’s National Science Agency.
The conference offered Alex an invaluable opportunity to meet with Human-Robot Interaction experts from all over the world and discuss the SONATA vision: where buildings can now become robotically-augmented to interact with occupants and improve their health & wellbeing, ultimately bridging the knowledge of Human-Robot Interaction with Human-Building Interaction, environmental psychology, and architectural research, and other disciplines.
Heading north, on March 13th Alex gave a guest lecture on his research, invited by the Urban Interfaces Lab at the University of Sydney.
Alex presented his research into the vision of adaptive architecture, or “spatial robots”, as the intersection of Human-Robot Interaction and Human-Building Interaction to dynamically transform the built environment to better meet human needs. In his lecture, Alex discussed his work as part of SONATA on how robotic technologies can augment spatio-temporal architectural structures in dynamically adapting to the needs of occupants in shared spaces, ‘nudge’ their behaviour and communicate intents through movement.
The invited lecture provided Alex with the forum to explore with colleagues how the SONATA findings can be transferred to inform the architecturally-appropriate behaviours of other robotic embodiments in urban and public spaces, to enrich the experience of humans, while also improving sustainability.
More information on the event can be found here: https://sydchi.hosting.acm.org/2025/03/09/event-radar-march-2025/
