Loneliness is a human experience that affects our social perception, including how we perceive robots as social beings. According to the Three-Factor Theory of Anthropomorphism, sociality motivation causes lonely humans to ascribe more social characteristics to robots. We tested this in a sequence of three studies (total $$N = 558$$ N = 558 ) within an art-science collaboration based on the installation Contact (2021), in which an industrial robot interacts with humans via organic movement patterns to make physical contact through a pane of glass. In the online study using a video and without real-world interaction, we found no significant effects. However, our two field studies with real-world human-robot interactions showed that humans who felt lonelier ascribed significantly more social characteristics to the robot and were more likely to also exhibit social behavior. The study shows how emotional states such as loneliness influence the perception of a robot. It enhances the literature by (i) providing high statistical power, (ii) incorporating real-world face-to-face human-robot interactions (in addition to online), (iii) utilizing behavioral variables (in addition to perceptual measures), and (iv) employing social movement cues (instead of humanoid appearance). We encourage researchers to engage in art-science collaborations to gain new perspectives that benefit multiple disciplines.

Being confronted with a dulling perception and challenges to be creative when working at home, I imagined my home office to sense my state of arousal and search together with me for inspirational moments by infusing its familiar appearance with distortion. In two prototypical human-home office interaction systems, we use Virtual Reality (VR), Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) to enhance a home office’s sensibility towards its user’s level of arousal as well as to enlarge its textural action space. Although physiological feedback in machine learning faces low learning rates, the resulting interaction offers a fresh perspective on our human-home office relation.

Body-centric design disciplines that utilize digitization processes such as fashion are tasked to engage with theoretical concepts commonly applied in digital-native design disciplines in order to use digital technologies as more than simple tools. Guided by intra-action theory, alternative ontological and hierarchical relations between the body and textiles were explored by digitally translating their movement. An installation was developed to find hybrid body-textile expressions using motion-capture sensors and robotic arms. The findings suggest that technological augmentations of the body and textiles can increasingly be diffracted in terms of their apparent physical-material boundaries through movement translation. Movement data functioned as a performative mediator, expanding movement-based expressions from one agent to another. Body-textile hybrids emerged from this process, and shaped each other in a mutual act of becoming, challenging ontological structures of the body and textiles commonly applied in fashion design.

Human language continuously generates patterned mechanical vibrations, yet the cellular consequences of such structured sound remain largely unexplored. Here, we investigate whether acoustic vibration with different degrees of temporal and spectral organization modulates actin cable architecture and polarity in the non auditory eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Using a direct contact stimulation setup, yeast cells expressing ABP140- GFP were exposed to sustained tonal sound, broadband white noise, or brief consonant like acoustic bursts designed to isolate speech relevant temporal structures without semantic content. Sustained tonal stimulation, characterized by rhythmic continuity and harmonic coherence similar to vowel like components of speech, increased ABP140- GFP signal intensity,actin branching and actin length and significantly enhanced shmoo formation. In contrast, broadband noise disrupted actin organization and suppressed shmooing, while transient consonant like bursts produced no measurable structural effects. These results indicate that language related acoustic structure, specifically sustained and coherent mechanical vibration, can modulate cytoskeletal organization in yeast, supporting the view of sound and speech as biologically active mechanical inputs rather than purely communicative signals.