That’s a wrap of our Workshop “From Questions to Prototype: Design Thinking for Interaction Research“, which took place this week, on 20 and 21 April 2026.

It started with an amazing and provocative talk from Wendy Ju on “How to run a design-forward HCI/HRI lab“, that showed us that starting with the research question may not be always the best way when we are designing human and robots interactions. And sometimes it is better to start with cheap robotic prototypes and spark unexpected interactions with users and then define the research questions.

This amazing talk followed by an hands on making and exploration of robots, using tilty bot, cardboard and our imagination. You can see the success of the workshop by the happy faces and the different embodiments and interactions from the robots. We had cutest robots that beg for reviews, service robots that offer tea , supporting ducks for debugging (without LLMs), aliens robots for social play and fans for wellbeing.

Finally, thank the organizers Wendy, Maria Teresa Parreira, Ilan Mandel and Isabel Neto (LASIGE integrated member). Thank all the participants for their amazing work, creativity and happiness, thanks Tiago Guerreiro (LASIGE integrated member) to lead the way in seeking the impact in people lives and finally our sponsors, that made this two days possible, LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) and FLAD – Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento.

Looking forward for the next time we meet again! And for those exploring human-robot interactions have a cardboard and some servo motors nearby, you will never know when they will be handy.