Published papers

This study investigates the potential of chart tools to augment or replace facilitation functions in Science Fiction Prototyping (SFP) workshops conducted by young students. SFP is a workshop methodology that utilizes science fiction to foster future visions, but facilitating SFP workshops poses significant challenges, particularly for young people with limited experience and vocabulary. To address this, a chart tool was developed to complement or delegate facilitation, and an experimental workshop was conducted to compare participants' discussions with and without the tool. The results indicate that the chart tool effectively supports certain facilitation functions, including “divergence and convergence” and “reflection.” The tool also enhances the length of the stories, indicating improved participants' imagination. The results of the experimental workshops suggested that the developed chart tool has the potential to complement some aspects of the facilitator's role, however, it did not replace the experienced human facilitators.

Persuasive communication that emphasizes a sense of ownership and self-determination is essential to achieve social good, such as the sustainable development goals. Although agent-based persuasion mainly targets attitude change, encouraging proactive participation in social issues also requires attention to the awareness of change, focusing on developing these internal motivations. This study aims to identify effective persuasion by agents regarding their sense of ownership and self-determination. To this end, we conducted an online survey with 400 participants, using a 2 × 2 design that manipulated the "target of persuasive act"(direct persuasion vs. indirect persuasion through agent-to-agent conversation [overheard communication (OHC)]) and the "target of persuasive content"(group- vs. individual-directed messages). The results revealed that individual-directed messages conveyed through the OHC were more effective.

In this study, we propose anthropomorphization framework, which directly anthropomorphize an object by using human-like body parts. Nowadays, home appliances have many functions and tend to be connected together by a home network. This situation makes users feel uneasy as they need to understand more complex informations. Instead of improving the design or the interface of objects, we prefer to provide information via anthropomorphic and communicative agents, which seems to be more useful and user-friendly. Our framework transforms an object into an agent called displaying robot by using anthropomorphization, which makes the interaction between human and the object more intuitive. To verify our framework, we conducted an experiment to verify the effectiveness of anthropomorphization by attaching such eye-like and arm-like devices to a home appliance and implemented information providing system using our framework.

qWe propose the device detecting the two-dimentional area human indicated by using the pyroelectric sensor. This device allows the information presentation for the area human indicated by the anthropomorphic object. For example, under explanation the function of electric appliances for customers in the shop, if customers indicate the worrisome area and the anthropomorphic electric appliance explains that area, information presentation can be more pertinent and visceral. Detection of the area is conducted by the output of pvroelecric sensors allocated in alignment.

本研究では，コミュニケーションロボットのための，人の体の向きを検知して対話者を判定するシステムBoDiDを提案する． BoDiDは顔検出による肩位置の検出モジュールとレーザレンジファインダの計測による人の体の向きの推定モジュールを持ち，推定された体の向きをベースにコミュニケーションロボットのユーザが対話相手となっているかどうか判定することを可能にする．