This book focuses on product design, and uses ideas in interaction research to help design better products. The author of this book is the Head of Design at Andrea Thomaz’s Diligent Robotics. Since robots most HRI researchers work on tend to be relatively social, Carla Diana decomposes it to understand how to create well-designed interactive products. She proposes a framework composed of Presence (the form of a product/robot), Expression (how it communicates using sound, light, motion, etc), Interaction (using sensor data for an interaction feedback loop), Context (social contexts like time/place to influence interaction), and Ecosystems (how behaviors can work together across skills). Although I agree with the design of the framework, some of the descriptions of the products as examples of good “social” design seemed like a stretch to me.

I found the overview pretty nice, but I the description of some of the product-specific examples seemed to vary in depth. Some were excellently discussed, while others had a few paragraphs of discussion that did not add much to the overall arguments. I do think the book does do a good job talking to its target audience of people who actively work on product design on how human-centered social design can play a more impactful role.