Terracotta Warrior Toys to Service Robots—Luwei Xu, China Academy of Art| BayCHI

Light dinner served at 6:30pm PT. Feel free to bring your own if you prefer. We strive to support both in-person and remote attendance, so we'll also fire up the Zoom at that point to support virtual socializing.

Abstract

Human-like artifacts do more than resemble us. They materialize how we understand identity, emotion, care, protection, authority, and coexistence. This talk explores design as a practice of mirroring through three projects:

• A customizable Terracotta Warrior art-toy system.
• An intelligent eldercare robot.
• An urban patrol robot.

The Terracotta project transforms a fixed cultural representation into a customizable character, preserving recognizable historical identity while inviting personal expression, contemporary storytelling, and co-creation.

The eldercare robot translates human expectations of care into approachable proportions, expressive visual feedback, soft materials, touch-based assistance, and safety-centered interaction.

The patrol robot addresses a different social role, balancing capability and authority with legibility, public safety, and a non-intimidating presence.

Across these three projects, Luwei Xu examines:

• How form shapes recognition and expectations of role.
• How emotion is projected, communicated, and felt.
• How interaction turns appearance into embodied social experience.

Rather than treating human-likeness as a visual style to be maximized, I argue that it must be carefully calibrated to people, purposes, and contexts. Human-like artifacts are not neutral mirrors: Designers participate in the mirroring process by deciding which human qualities, values, and relationships become visible and actionable. Moving from symbolic representation to personal projection and embodied interaction, this talk asks not only how we make artifacts more human-like, but what these artifacts reveal about--and invite us to reconsider--being human.

Bio

Luwei Xu is a Ph.D. candidate in Industrial Design at the China Academy of Art. His work explores the form, interaction, and emotional design of service robots and culturally-grounded character systems. Combining industrial design, HCI, and design research, he investigates how the morphology of humanoid robot and human-like artifacts communicate identity, intention, and emotion, and how these qualities influence approachability, trust, and engagement.

Location, In Person

UCSC Silicon Valley Extension
Room 3003
3175 Bowers Ave
Santa Clara, CA 95054

Zoom registration
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/j_CXadcYRIm3j7S4Wlkl4g

Stream On YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXhFKKbGqZQ

For more info
https://baychi.org/_tV