Work

Elmo: An Embodied Conversational Assistant For Community Repair Cafés

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Repair cafés provide a community service that supports and empowers item ‘Bringers’ to reinstate traditional values of repair in order to reduce climate impacts of waste. In this paper, we report on a pilot study exploring the use of Elmo (an embodied conversational assistant) by volunteer Repairers within repair café settings. Our findings show the different ways Repairers incorporated this technology probe into their work and the challenges they faced in doing so. Through this, we contribute three areas of consideration for designers looking to implement conversational assistants into community repair settings. These include, contextual awareness of time to undertake suggestions and of the related repair café processes, motivation and customer relations requirements of volunteer Repairers, and enhancing empowerment work through supporting current practices and demonstrations of navigating trouble in repair-resource interactions.

DOI: 10.1145/3719160.3737627

Authors: Teresa Castle-Green, Simon Castle-Green, Joseph Lindley, Neelima Sailaja, Susan Lechelt

Institutions: University of Nottingham, Lancaster University, University of Edinburgh

Language: English

Topic: Social Robot Interaction and HRI

Subfield: Social Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: green

Funder: UK Research and Innovation

Award: G1978331145