arXiv subjects

Alex Binh Vinh Duc Nguyen

Publications and source records attributed to Alex Binh Vinh Duc Nguyen.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Animated Public Furniture as an Interaction Mediator: Engaging Passersby In-the-Wild with Robotic Benches

Urban HCI investigates how digital technologies shape human behaviour within the social, spatial, temporal dynamics of public space. Meanwhile, robotic furniture research demonstrates how the purposeful animation of mundane utilitarian elements can influence human behaviour in everyday contexts. Taken together, these strands highlight an untapped opportunity to investigate how animated public furniture could mediate social interaction in urban environments. In this paper, we present the design process and in-the-wild study of mobile robotic benches that reconfigure with a semi-outdoor public space. Our findings show that the gestural performance of the benches manifested three affordances perceived by passersby, they activated engagement as robots, redistributed engagement as spatial elements, and settled engagement as infrastructure. We proposed an Affordance Transition Model (ATM) describing how robotic furniture could proactively facilitate transition between these affordances to engage passersby. Our study bridges robotic furniture and urban HCI to activate human experience with the built environment purposefully.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Architectural HRI: Towards a Robotic Paradigm Shift in Human-Building Interaction

Recent advances in sensing, communication, interfaces, control, and robotics are expanding Human-Building Interaction (HBI) beyond adaptive building services and facades toward the physical actuation of architectural space. In parallel, research in robotic furniture, swarm robotics, and shape-changing spaces shows that architectural elements can now be robotically augmented to move, reconfigure, and adapt space. We propose that these advances promise a paradigm shift in HBI, in which multiple building layers physically adapt in synchrony to support occupant needs and sustainability goals more holistically. Conversely, we argue that this emerging paradigm also provides an ideal case for transferring HRI knowledge to unconventional robotic morphologies, including the interpretation of the robot as multiple architectural layers or even as a building. However, this research agenda remains challenged by the temporal, spatial, and social complexity of architectural HRI, and by fragmented knowledge across HCI, environmental psychology, cognitive science, and architecture. We therefore call for interdisciplinary research that unifies the why, what, and how of robotic actuation in architectural forms.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

An HCI Perspective on Sustainable GenAI Integration in Architectural Design Education

Generative AI (genAI) is increasingly influencing architectural design practice and is expected to affect, or even transform, the profession, even though its benefits and costs remain unresolved. In response, design schools are increasingly integrating genAI into their curricula. Yet this integration creates a paradox: critical engagement with genAI often requires increased use of the tools in question, despite limited methods for estimating their environmental cost in teaching contexts. In this paper, we argue that HCI offers a useful methodological lens for addressing this tension. We propose three HCI-informed directions for more sustainable genAI integration in architectural education: contextual eco-feedback, participatory stakeholder scoping, and reframing data centres as an interdisciplinary focus. We therefore argue that genAI should be understood not only as a new architectural design tool, but also as a socio-technical process that architectural education, and design education in general, must engage with critically.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Manifesting Architectural Subspaces with Two Mobile Robotic Partitions to Facilitate Spontaneous Office Meetings

Although intended to foster spontaneous interactions among workers, a typical open-plan office layout cannot mitigate visual, acoustic, or privacy-related distractions that originate from unplanned meetings. As office workers often refrain from tackling these issues by manually demarcating or physically relocating to a more suitable subspace that is enclosed by movable partitions, we hypothesise that these subspaces could instead be robotically manifested. This study therefore evaluated the perceived impact of two mobile robotic partitions that were wizarded to jointly manifest an enclosed subspace, to: 1) either `mitigate' or `intervene' in the distractions caused by spontaneous face-to-face or remote meetings; or 2) either `gesturally' or `spatially' nudge a distraction-causing worker to relocate. Our findings suggest how robotic furniture should interact with office workers with and through transient space, and autonomously balance the distractions not only for each individual worker but also for multiple workers sharing the same workspace.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Eliciting Understandable Architectonic Gestures for Robotic Furniture through Co-Design Improvisation

The vision of adaptive architecture proposes that robotic technologies could enable interior spaces to physically transform in a bidirectional interaction with occupants. Yet, it is still unknown how this interaction could unfold in an understandable way. Inspired by HRI studies where robotic furniture gestured intents to occupants by deliberately positioning or moving in space, we hypothesise that adaptive architecture could also convey intents through gestures performed by a mobile robotic partition. To explore this design space, we invited 15 multidisciplinary experts to join co-design improvisation sessions, where they manually manoeuvred a deactivated robotic partition to design gestures conveying six architectural intents that varied in purpose and urgency. Using a gesture elicitation method alongside motion-tracking data, a Laban-based questionnaire, and thematic analysis, we identified 20 unique gestural strategies. Through categorisation, we introduced architectonic gestures as a novel strategy for robotic furniture to convey intent by indexically leveraging its spatial impact, complementing the established deictic and emblematic gestures. Our study thus represents an exploratory step toward making the autonomous gestures of adaptive architecture more legible. By understanding how robotic gestures are interpreted based not only on their motion but also on their spatial impact, we contribute to bridging HRI with Human-Building Interaction research.

cs.HC↗