Cuteness as a ‘Dark Pattern’ in Home Robots

Dark patterns are a recent phenomenon in the field of interaction design, where design patterns and behavioral psychology are deployed in ways that deceive the user. However, the current corpus of dark patterns literature focuses largely on screen-based digital interactions and should be expanded to include home robots. In this paper, we apply the concept of dark patterns to the ‘cute’ aesthetic of home robots and suggest that their design constitutes a dark pattern in HRI by (1) emphasizing short-term gains over long-term decisions; (2) depriving users of some degree of conscious agency at the site of interaction; and (3) creating an affective response in the user for the purpose of collecting emotional data. This exploratory paper expands the current library of dark patterns and their application to new technological interfaces into the domain of home robotics in order to establish the grounds for an ethical design practice in HRI.

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