How can a home robot be designed not just to function, but to be experienced as a presence within everyday life?
As single-person households increase, loneliness and social isolation have become everyday social challenges, particularly in urban contexts.
Emotional connection with robots is shaped less by functional intelligence and more by how people interpret a robot's presence. While conversational accuracy and capability mattered, what most influenced trust was consistency, timing, and the robot's perceived intention within everyday life. This reflection reframed my understanding of robot design from optimizing interaction to shaping how technology is experienced as a coexisting presence.
Ballie was designed to build emotional connection through recognition and timing rather than constant interaction. By understanding who is present and when to engage, Ballie responds in ways that align with users' routines, energy levels, and everyday contexts. Using mobile proximity and camera-based recognition, Ballie identifies when users are nearby and delivers timely cues that reflect habits, schedules, weather, and ongoing situations.
Ballie supports family connections by acting as a mediator when people or pets are not physically together. When a pet is home alone, Ballie assists with care routines and provides gentle stimulation. When distance creates concern, Ballie shares updates and moments with family members to maintain a sense of presence rather than constant monitoring. In designing these features, emotional connection was not treated as a goal to maximize, but as a relationship to be carefully paced.
Rather than treating projection as a fixed output, Ballie was designed to adapt its screen presence to evolving situations within the home. By identifying available surfaces and adjusting scale and placement, projection becomes responsive to context rather than demanding attention. This allowed visual information to appear only when needed, supporting awareness without turning the robot into a constant focal point.
1) Conversational Interaction
Conversation allowed Ballie to offer support without requiring visual attention, enabling interaction during movement, rest, or emotional moments.
2) Touch Interaction
Touch provided reassurance and confirmation when voice felt intrusive or inappropriate, allowing users to remain in control of when and how they engaged.
3) Mobile App Control
Mobile control supported continuity beyond physical proximity, enabling users to manage settings and maintain awareness without constant interaction.
After identifying a range of potential interaction scenarios, I explored how users perceived different modes of interaction without relying on a screen. Rather than assuming screen-less interactions were always preferable, this research helped clarify when reducing visual output lowered friction, and when visual feedback remained necessary to support understanding and trust. Each scenario required a prioritized interaction method, and the robot needed to systematically suggest the most appropriate mode based on context, attention, and user activity.
A global gesture study was conducted to identify culturally appropriate and universally intuitive interactions. By accounting for sociocultural contexts across regions, we finalized a primary gesture for Ballie that could function as a consistent global entry point for initiating interaction.
Importance of gestures as low-effort entry points, particularly in moments when voice or screens felt intrusive or inappropriate.
Limiting alerts to the minimum necessary for each context emerged as a core design principle. A significant portion of the design process involved understanding how errors were perceived and how they should be communicated without disrupting daily life.
Because Ballie operates as a hardware-based robot, errors are often influenced by environmental conditions such as obstacles or surface changes within the home. To help users understand these situations intuitively, I established foundational principles for error communication that adjusted feedback based on user location and activity. Rather than relying on continuous or intrusive notifications, error feedback was designed to appear only when recognition was essential.
One of the most compelling findings was how users gradually interpreted Ballie's presence over time. When the initial prototype was introduced at CES (Consumer Electronics Show), I questioned whether the robot's physical size and mobility might feel intrusive or burdensome within the home.
However, as interactions became more familiar, I observed users begin to perceive Ballie less as a device and more as a companion or pet-like presence. This shift was not limited to general users — there was notable interest from individuals facing emotional or daily challenges, including people living alone and families with children who require additional care. Through these observations, I recognized a broader demand for home robots that offer not only functional assistance, but also emotional presence.
Designing screen-less interactions taught me that meaningful connection often emerges not from visibility or constant feedback, but from restraint, timing, and sensitivity to context. This insight reframed my understanding of interaction design from optimizing responsiveness to carefully shaping presence within everyday life.
