Data Sheet 2_Calm beats cute: designing aesthetic-functional congruence in human-robot interaction for breathing companion robots.pdf

Perceived human-likeness positively predicted both warmth and competence, confirming its role in social evaluation. However, human-likeness alone did not determine preference: despite comparable perceived human-likeness between the two humanoid designs, the meditative humanoid achieved the highest scores for competence, trustworthiness, and breathing companion preference, outperforming the cartoon-like humanoid.</p>Discussion<p>These results suggest that “calm” aesthetics are preferred over “cute” aesthetics for wellbeing robots, challenging the assumption that human-likeness alone drives design success.

Instead, aesthetic-functional congruence-alignment between a robot's visual design and its functional purpose, appears to be a critical, under-explored factor in social robot design for wellbeing. Since this study assessed general evaluations, future work should test whether these preferences hold across application domains (e.g. clinical, workplace, educational, domestic) and cross-cultural contexts.</p>