A wealth of evidence suggests that love, closeness, and intimacy---in short relatedness---are important for people’s psychological well-being. Nowadays, however, couples are often forced to live apart. Accordingly, there has been a growing and flourishing interest in designing technologies that mediate (and create) a feeling of relatedness when being separated, beyond the explicit verbal communication and simple emoticons available technologies offer. This article provides a review of 143 published artifacts (i.e., design concepts, technologies). Based on this, we present six strategies used by designers/researchers to create a relatedness experience: Awareness, expressivity, physicalness, gift giving, joint action, and memories. We understand those strategies as starting points for the experience-oriented design of technology.

Robots increasingly act as our social counterparts in domains such as healthcare and retail. For these human-robot interactions (HRI) to be effective, a question arises on whether we trust robots the same way we trust humans. We investigated whether the determinants competence and warmth, known to influence interpersonal trust development, influence trust development in HRI, and what role anthropomorphism plays in this interrelation. In two online studies with 2 × 2 between-subjects design, we investigated the role of robot competence (Study 1) and robot warmth (Study 2) in trust development in HRI. Each study explored the role of robot anthropomorphism in the respective interrelation. Videos showing an HRI were used for manipulations of robot competence (through varying gameplay competence) and robot anthropomorphism (through verbal and non-verbal design cues and the robot's presentation within the study introduction) in Study 1 (n= 155) as well as robot warmth (through varying compatibility of intentions with the human player) and robot anthropomorphism (same as Study 1) in Study 2 (n= 157). Results show a positive effect of robot competence (Study 1) and robot warmth (Study 2) on trust development in robots regarding anticipated trust and attributed trustworthiness. Subjective perceptions of competence (Study 1) and warmth (Study 2) mediated the interrelations in question. Considering applied manipulations, robot anthropomorphism neither moderated interrelations of robot competence and trust (Study 1) nor robot warmth and trust (Study 2). Considering subjective perceptions, perceived anthropomorphism moderated the effect of perceived competence (Study 1) and perceived warmth (Study 2) on trust on an attributional level. Overall results support the importance of robot competence and warmth for trust development in HRI and imply transferability regarding determinants of trust development in interpersonal interaction to HRI. Results indicate a possible role of perceived anthropomorphism in these interrelations and support a combined consideration of these variables in future studies. Insights deepen the understanding of key variables and their interaction in trust dynamics in HRI and suggest possibly relevant design factors to enable appropriate trust levels and a resulting desirable HRI. Methodological and conceptual limitations underline benefits of a rather robot-specific approach for future research.

We collected over a thousand technology-mediated positive experiences with media and obtained measures describing aspects of the experience itself (affect, psychological need fulfillment) and of the product (i.e., content and technology) integral to the experience (pragmatic quality, hedonic quality). We found a strong relation between intensity of need fulfillment and positive affect. Furthermore, different activities had different need profiles. Watching was foremost a relatedness experience, listening a stimulation and meaning experience, and playing a competence experience. Need fulfillment and positive affect was related to perceptions of hedonic quality, however moderated through attribution, that is, the belief that the product played a role in creating the experience. Pragmatic quality was not linked to experiential measures. The present study (a) demonstrates the merits of distinguishing between an experience-oriented and a product-oriented evaluation, (b) suggests a set of possible measurement instruments for experience-oriented and a product-oriented evaluation, and (c) details the process of how positive experience is transformed into positive product perceptions and judgments of appeal.