From Felt Experience to Robotic Design: Embodied Techniques for Expressive Movement and Shape

This paper builds on the premise that the performing arts constitute a field of knowledge that can inspire new approaches to robot design and behaviour in social robotics, and provides con- crete guidance on how designers can integrate embodied perfor- mance techniques into their practice. Our work draws specifically on the concept of demechanisation from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. De-mechanisation focuses on disrupting participants’ habitual bodily patterns through playful, accessible prompts that invite imaginative movement without the need for prior training. We argue that these exercises enable robot designers—who are not typically trained in expressive movement—to explore motion from a first- person, embodied perspective, fostering empathy and sparking inspiration for more imaginative movement design for non anthropomorphic robots. In addition to a selection of demechanisation exercises, we propose a wearable body-extension toolkit designed for body extension and body encasement as part of an embodied ideation approach. We tested this approach in a workshop centred on designing an emotionally expressive two-cuboid robot. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), we examined how participants experienced bodily disruption, reconfigured movement perception, and developed expressive, affective, and imaginative understandings through the interplay of form and movement. Based on these findings, we evaluate the effectiveness of the method and articulate how our approach extends existing embodied design methods.