In line with thinking of the real world mostly in terms of socio-physical environments, a common way to conceptualise the everyday in HRI research is to refer to domestic settings (including in the case of the above-mentioned ELCA (Weiss and Hannibal, 2018)). In general, service robots have often been classified as robots for either professional or personal uses, where the term “personal” has sometimes been used as synonymous with “domestic” (Gonzalez-Aguirre et al., 2021). Social robots are often designed to move around in unstructured and constantly changing environments that are characteristics of people’s homes. The latter are typically viewed as places where private life unfolds. HRI research offers a number of studies conducted in domestic settings where people shared households with robots to a varying degree, whether in real or simulated homes (Forlizzi and DiSalvo, 2006; Koay et al., 2009; Syrdal et al., 2009; Walters et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2022). This is also where one can observe the most frequent use of explicit references to the notion of everyday life, as it is taken-for-granted that daily life takes place at home (see, e.g., (Auger, 2014; de Graaf et al., 2016; Weiss and Hannibal, 2018)). In line with such thinking, social robots have also been studied in institutional residential settings where specific groups of people stay and live on a regular basis. For example, people in need of long-term residential care spend much time in nursing homes or rehabilitation centers, where social robots are introduced and used to assist both residents and care givers with daily tasks. Studies that stress the importance of carrying out HRI research in those specific settings (Mannion et al., 2020) are guided by the attention for everyday environments and related robot applications, which can be understood in terms of human daily life with robots. Yet another way of addressing real-life settings in HRI is to conduct HRI studies in public settings. This includes, for example, shopping malls (Kanda et al., 2009; Sabelli and Kanda, 2016), airports (Triebel et al., 2016; Joosse and Evers, 2017) or city spaces (Weiss et al., 2008; Weiss et al., 2010) among others, where people engage with robots, and other persons, as part of their daily life. Such an approach opens a discussion into what makes a given task or action “daily,” or what is a relationship and distinction between the private and public domain in people’s everyday life, particularly if we also include virtual spaces. For example, a recent study in digital anthropology has described smartphones as ‘transportal homes’, i.e., new places within which we live (Miller et al., 2021). Also, it has been argued that the actions we pursue in a public and private sphere are equally “everyday” [(Sztompka, 2008): 31]. An alternative approach includes addressing everyday settings in terms of “contexts” for people’s daily experiences (e.g., aging) and related engagement with robotic technologies (Lee et al., 2016). In any case, regardless of their specific features and distinctions we make, it is important to note that addressing everyday settings is often instrumental to investigation of other subjects relevant for HRI research and a daily use of robots, e.g., human trust or acceptance of robots in daily life (Ray et al., 2008; de Graaf et al., 2016; Kuhnert et al., 2017) rather than a research theme in its own right. At the same time, domestic/residential and public settings together make everyday environments that constitute a solid basis for further conceptualisation of everyday life in HRI in terms of a ‘living space’ (see Section 5.1).

Another way to conceptualise the everyday in HRI research is in terms of the tasks or activities that social robots are intended to be used for, i.e., specific application domains (Weiss and Hannibal, 2018). While robotic systems used in the contexts of, e.g., healthcare, warfare, manufacturing, rescue, or space exploration are required to carry out very specialised tasks, social robots are typically designed to assist people with general activities in their daily life, e.g., helping people with exercising, cleaning, eating, learning, cooking, socialising, or shopping (Lum et al., 2020; Huang and Huang, 2021). This is how, while supporting everyday tasks, robots may become “everyday objects” (Kaplan, 2005). From this perspective, the everyday refers to those parts of life that occur on a regular basis and that most people are familiar with. A successful application of social robots in this context is also dependent on how well such robots can be integrated into or adapt to people’s habits or routines of actions or behaviour (the goal that can be difficult for technology to achieve, especially with regards to everyday household routines (de Graaf et al., 2016)), and on the degree the interaction with robots can be perceived as ‘natural’. Since this kind of activities is to a large extent considered habitual or mundane, social robots are often required to meet the needs of people through some form of personalisation or basic awareness about which social norms or scripts can be used for the various daily activities (Lee et al., 2012). All in all, a focus on robot applications and related human activities offers a potential for a more holistic conceptualisation of everyday life in HRI, as it covers a variety of domains from domestic assistance, through education or transportation, to healthcare.

Yet another way to address the everyday in HRI research is to look at the target population intended to use social robots. In general, HRI studies in the real-life settings may involve various types of participants, from randomly selected individuals, through robot users to the actual robot owners (Lee et al., 2022). Those HRI studies that explicitly address the subject of everyday life often refer to people involved in the studies as “lay” or “naïve” users (Takayama et al., 2008; Theofilis et al., 2015; Suguitan and Hoffman, 2019; Rossi et al., 2020). The term “naïve” however is problematic as it does not accurately describe a lack of only a specific type of (technical) knowledge about robotics systems it points to (rather than a quality of being generally naïve), and it undermines people’s active role in shaping technology by their “everyday living with it” [(Bakardjieva, 2005): 38]. An alternative term that we also view as more suitable for HRI research is that of ‘non-expert’ users, or ‘lay experts’ (Weiss and Spiel, 2022) (of course, we are not implying that people are not experts in other areas and everyday activities, including in those that roboticists may have a little understanding of). Such a term is useful not only in referring to people’s limited knowledge or experience regarding robots but also in explicitly situating HRI research in everyday contexts (Lee and Sabanović, 2014; Papagni et al., 2022). It also allows looking at the study participants with the attention for wider socio-cultural and professional backgrounds, e.g., as non-expert caregivers (Louie and Nejat, 2020), rather than only “users” of a given robot (the overall need for a greater contextualisation of HRI studies has been by now well-recognised and articulated (Lee et al., 2016; Lee et al., 2022)). This is particularly true for social robots that in principle are designed for non-expert populations (e.g., elderly, children, or school-teachers) that dominate studies “in-the-wild” (Lee et al., 2022).

Perhaps the most holistic view of the everyday, and a perspective closest to SSH research, is the HRI method of studying robots and human-robot interactions “in-the-wild.” In general, conducting studies in the expected contexts of use, or field studies [6], refer to real-life environments that may vary form simulated real-world settings to the actual socio-physical spaces outside the laboratory. Such a methodology is viewed as instrumental in improving robot design and functionalities [including with the involvement of the study participants as co-designers (Ostrowski et al., 2022)] in a way that robots best fulfil people’s expectations, preferences and needs, and fit into people’s lives. Thus, field studies help increase ecological validity of the HRI studies, i.e., generalisability of the findings to the real world ¹ [6]. At the same time, studies ‘in-the-wild’ involve serious technical and methodological challenges and play only a complementary role in the contemporary HRI research (Jung and Hinds, 2018; Syrdal et al., 2020). The very idea of designing robots for everyday life has sometimes been described as going “on the absolute outer limits of workability” [(Maibaum et al., 2022): 472] in robotics. For the purposes of this work, it is important to emphasise that studies ‘in-the-wild’ involve not only a specific type of environments but also the type of users and research subjects that cannot be successfully addressed in the laboratory settings. Also, such studies allow addressing the underlying socio-cultural assumptions on both the robot developers and end-users’ side [17], or social environments and group dynamics that otherwise remain unnoticed or obscure (Jung and Hinds, 2018; Lee et al., 2022). An important feature of the studies ‘in-the-wild’ is an emphasis on and efforts to conduct long-term studies (Ostrowski et al., 2022) that would hence address not only spatial but also temporal settings typical of our daily life, and the type of activities such spatio-temporal settings involve. For example, the Everyday-life centered approach (ELCA) emphasises the need to capture and record encounters between humans and robots in unstructured situations and real-time. The key three dimensions of everyday life according to ELCA include actions, meaning and materiality (Weiss and Hannibal, 2018). All in all, while the HRI field is yet to assist development of theories, methods, technologies as well as institutional frameworks and practices that would allow studying social robots ‘in-the-wild’ systematically and on a large-scale, a large part of HRI research has been gradually shifting towards the subject of everyday life.

Across different SSH perspectives there is a consensus that the everyday is largely self-evident in people’s lives or taken-for-granted (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973; Gardiner, 2000). This is due to the very content of everyday life that involves common-sense and habitual meanings and activities, i.e., “the routine, taken-for-granted experiences, beliefs and practices; the mundane ordinary world” [(Featherstone, 1992): 160]. A key element of daily life in this context is its recurrent character and a degree of familiarity it implies. This is also why everyday life is generally considered difficult to grasp and life-worlds inherently “intransparent” [(Schutz and Luckmann, 1973): 169]. Examples of sociological perspectives that have explored the taken-for-granted character of everyday life include particularly ethnomethodological research that have also started to appear in some HRI studies (Pitsch and Koch, 2010; Jarske et al., 2020; Yamazaki et al., 2022; Pelikan and Jung, 2023) (its focus on micro-interactions and extensive use of conversation analysis makes ethnomethodology particularly attractive for HRI research that involves human-robot social interactions). To what extent and whether people actually approach their daily world “unreflexively” is subject of different interpretations (to the point of considering the “extraordinary” a common component of the everyday, or everyday reflexivity as consisting of unconscious elements too [(Gardiner, 2000): 6]). On the one hand, a self-evident quality of everyday experiences is limited, since the life-world also includes the provinces that are yet unfamiliar and undetermined for a given person [(Schutz and Luckmann, 1973): 167], and every human experience has potentially unlimited new explications [(Schutz and Luckmann, 1973): 169]. On the other hand, everyday life tends to provide a stable order to people and what often seems to be an unalterable horizon of action [(Gardiner, 2000): 5]. This is true as long as people’s everyday experiences and their meanings remain uncontradicted. The moment disruptions of daily routine occur, when what is familiar becomes defamiliarised, or incongruent with our previous experiences, an opportunity for increased reflexivity, and consequently a social change emerges [(Gardiner, 2000): 19-20; (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973): 11]. In line with such thinking, and from a postmodernist perspective, everyday experience has sometimes been viewed as a site of continuous struggle and contestation, and hence far from being ordinary or unproblematic. In this sense, everyday life constitutes a taken-for-granted reality in plurality of forms and meanings, and everyday experiences are highly diversified and complex (Sandywell, 2004).

Perhaps for different reasons (e.g., to address technical and design challenges), HRI and robotics research too has been concerned with the complexity, “wickedness” (Bischof et al., 2020) or ‘messiness’ of the human real-world (Auger, 2014; Dautenhahn, 2018; Matarić, 2018; Bartneck et al., 2020). This applies particularly to the complexity of the real-world problems and of the related data and socio-physical environments, as well as the unpredictability of human behaviour that often make it difficult to plan and execute HRI studies ‘in-the-wild’. The very use of robots in everyday worlds has sometimes been described as “an enormous challenge” (Bischof et al., 2020) and “an absolute borderline case” (ibid.) for robotics. Also, the core of HRI research involving social robots focuses on the “natural” robot design and human-robot interactions. What is “natural” for humans and for the way they interact with and perceive robots is debatable, but in social robotics and HRI it includes exploiting those human characteristics and behaviours that appear to be largely unconscious or “automatic” (particularly with regards to human sociality and a tendency to anthropomorphise (Zawieska et al., 2012)). Such an approach has the potential to go beyond studying only human-robot interactions and build upon the existing SSH scholarship to systematically theorise and empirically investigate human everyday life as a whole. This may include not only studying what makes social robots and related interactions ‘natural’, but also deliberately exploring the element of the non-human or “extraordinary” (the idea inherent in the design that limits robot human-like features to the minimum (Duffy, 2003; Zaga et al., 2017)), that challenges a familiar or self-evident character of the everyday, particularly the underlying assumptions with regards to what it means to be human.

Traditionally, different theories of everyday life have emphasised the immediacy of lived experiences. This conveys the image of persons as embodied subjects who engage with other people and the world around them through bodily experiences. In other words, “[e]veryday life is bodily life” [(Silverstone, 2002): 764]. The latter may refer to body-related features, e.g., age, or more broadly, particular material resources and limitations (Silverstone, 2002), as well as spatial and temporal immediacy, that together contribute to how we experience our everyday life, the Other and the social world. In a wider sense, a characteristic of being embodied and socially embedded points to the contextuality of human experiences or specific phenomena such as the human mind [(Linell and Valsiner, 2009): xxviii]. Immediate experiences are often synonymous with lived experiences and directly opposed to different forms of theoretical and cognitive abstractions. The emphasis on the immediacy of experience implies also the emphasis upon the present, and hence, an overall “non-reflexive sense of immersion” [(Featherstone, 1992): 161] in the everyday. Thus, just everyday life, the actual lived experiences are “pre-reflective,” and hence difficult to grasp in their immediate manifestation [(Finlay, 2002): 533]. Past experiences or any new experiences become part of our current “stock of knowledge” within the life-world that, unless it is contradicted, constitutes a taken-for-granted valid reference schema in the everyday (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973). At the same time, it is important to note that the immediacy of experiences is subject to gradation between the immediate and mediate experiences (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973). In the times of a mediated culture and globally mediatised world, the concept of unmediated everyday life has sometimes been fully rejected (Sandywell, 2004), and mediation described as central to our everyday (Silverstone, 2002). This is particularly true for technology-enabled communication and related meaning-making processes, with the media becoming “the second order paramount reality” [(Silverstone, 2002): 763]. From a postphenomenological perspective, technologies have even lost their mediation role since they are no longer “between” humans and their world, as they merge with the human body and experience (Verbeek, 2012). An alternative approach is to address everyday life as a space or an intersection that overcomes different dualisms and dichotomies of the modern thought, e.g., between mind/body, abstract/concrete, immediate/mediate, or ordinary/extraordinary (Sandywell, 2004). This also applies to lived experience whose immediacy and bodily nature is an important but not the only possible characteristic, particularly under and after postmodernism. From a methodological point of view, it is important to note that despite their immediacy, human experiences can be represented and studied as such, e.g., as textual representations of the lived experience of femininity [(McRobbie, 2003): 153], or visual representations produced by the study participants that represent specific aspects of their human experience (Lenette and Boddy, 2013).

One could argue that the emphasis on immediacy and embodiment goes to the core of HRI research. Robots are typically physically embodied systems, and the way human-robot interactions and human behaviours are understood and studied in HRI involves a significant degree of spatial and temporal immediacy. In other words, while HRI research often recognises the potential of robots to impact our everyday life as a whole, in practice, when studying human daily life with robots, the HRI studies typically address a close proximity and direct interaction with robots. We propose this is a major area for developments and experimentation in HRI, when addressing long-term human engagement with robots outside the laboratory and online settings. This may include an overall gradual shift from studying “interaction,” “interaction experience,” or “user experience” towards developing a more holistic view of “lived experiences” on both an individual and societal level. Such an approach requires attention for the factors that go far beyond a person’s past or present immediate experiences involving robots, or a related novelty effect, and addressing people’s “life-worlds” instead.

When discussing lived experiences in SSH in connection to the immediacy and bodily nature of such experiences, the emphasis is also on the situatedness of lived experiences in a concrete space and time. What follows is a focus on “concrete persons” and a “concrete world” (Gardiner, 2000; Heller, 2015) that are always located within specific sociohistorical and material conditions (as against theorising an abstract, disengaged and purely cognitive relation a person may have with the Other and a related lived environment [(Gardiner, 2000): 48-50]). Also, the emphasis on the ‘concrete’ involves focusing on “life-worlds” that refer to the worlds of daily existence and reality of specific persons (Sandywell, 2004), with a particular attention for “action” or “practice” that largely contribute to the content and structure of everyday life (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973; Heller, 2015). This has important methodological implications for SSH research (and potentially HRI), since at least in principle, “if anything, everyday life is certainly ‘visible’, and therefore observable” [(Sztompka, 2008): 24]. At the same time, as already mentioned, routinised or habitual elements of everyday life can be difficult to grasp or articulate due to their quality of being largely outside of the conscious thought (Weiss and Hannibal, 2018). While the term “situatedness” has been well-established in robotics as it points to robotics systems existing in and being affected by complex, dynamic environments (Matarić, 2006) (and in HCI, particularly through Suchman’s early ethnomethodological research on situated actions (Suchman, 1987; Suchman, 2007)), in HRI, a situated character of everyday experiences typically translates into the subject of “contextualisation.” While still limited in number and scope, more and more HRI studies have been addressing different contextual factors that play a role in human actions, attitudes and the related use of robots, from individual features and backgrounds, through the accompanying social dynamics, to wider socio-cultural contexts (Lee et al., 2022). The process of contextualisation may also refer to the development of situated understanding of robots that emerges from the real-world interactions (Šabanović, 2010) or the need to interpret research results within larger HRI multidisciplinary frameworks inclusive of SSH (Seibt et al., 2021). This offers multiple new topics and lines of inquiry, e.g., into socially-situated HRI (Chang and Šabanović, 2015) or feminist perspectives on the embodied and gendered user experience in HRI (Winkle et al., 2023a). From this perspective, contexts and situations can be understood not as “static containers for ideas, thoughts, and interactions” [(Linell and Valsiner, 2009): 16] but rather as resources that “dynamically change with the participants’ communicative and cognitive activities” (ibid.). The question is how to investigate these subjects in a way it helps advance not only the field of HRI but also the SSH-driven critique of the contemporary everyday life.

Given the broad cross-disciplinary consensus on that humans are social beings (Enfield et al., 2006; Goodwin, 2018; Lee et al., 2022), human everyday life has often been seen as inherently and explicitly “social.” It has been argued that “the reality of the everyday life-world is a social reality” [(Pedersen, 2016): xxx], where human sociality is not just complex but also under many aspects “special” (Enfield et al., 2006). In other words, “the social world is nothing other than an interpersonal field, an inter-human space. . . this embeddedness of human beings in the relationships with other human beings occurs nowhere else but in our everyday experiences” [(Dumouchel and Damiano, 2017): 30]. From this perspective, human life-worlds are neither private nor public but shared, i.e., built upon intersubjectivity and common experiences [(Pedersen, 2016): 68]. Lived experiences in particular may contain specific forms of sociality, i.e., “various forms of the experience of others” [(Pedersen, 2016): 27]. Of course, the concept and experience of sociality and human embeddedness in larger social structures continues to change, particularly in the present age of radical individualisation (Sztompka and Burawoy, 2011). Also, the very understanding of what makes a given domain or activity private or public is highly culture-specific, and the notion of privacy is being constantly redefined as the use of different digital technologies increases. In any case, the key focus of the SSH analyses of everyday life is on “the social,” and it is also the crucial aspect of HRI research. It has been argued that investigations of human interactions with social robots, and hence, social interactions, is what constitutes the core of HRI and makes it unique as a discipline (Bartneck et al., 2020). This includes studies of what makes human-robot interactions a “social experience” and how to deliver it (Burch, 1990; Husserl, 2002), and occasionally the studies that explicitly address people’s experiences of living with social robots in home settings (Heidegger, 1967; Sarte, 1984; Huang and Huang, 2021). However, assessing people’s lived experiences regarding social robots is a difficult task with multiple variables and perspectives involved (de Beuvoir, 1953) that is yet to be fully addressed in HRI. The challenge is not only in developing suitable theoretical and methodological frameworks but also in recognising the importance of people’s lived experiences as such (rather than, e.g.,. prioritise designers’ and developers’ technical expert knowledge (Miller et al., 2021)) and systematically addressing such experiences in their whole richness and complexity within wider socio-cultural contexts (Prus, 1996; Merleau-Ponty, 2012).

As discussed above, everyday life has typically been viewed in HRI as synonymous with a domestic life. It important to note however, that while home as a space and concept often holds a particular significance in people’s lives, our everyday life is multi-sited (Bakardjieva, 2005). This is particularly important in a situation where a distinction between the private and public is increasingly blurred, and the very notion of a household or what we consider a family and couple changes (Beck, 2001). Also, in the contemporary society, daily life has been increasingly taking place in virtual or otherwise technologicaly-mediated spaces, including ‘no-places’ such as the internet. While multi-sited approaches are well-known in SSH, particularly in ethnographic research (Hasse, 2019; Pink et al., 2020), choosing specific sites for analysis is far from being a trivial task, and should always involve participation of the persons whose lives we actually study. Perhaps a useful analogy in this context that comes from the SSH research is that of ‘horizons’. In general, the term ‘horizons’ refers to frameworks or temporal and spatial perspectives within which people construct the meaning and value of their actions in the world [(Gardiner, 2000): 21; (Taylor, 1989): 27], or the “inner and outer horizons” of all everyday experiences [(Schutz and Luckmann, 1973): 167] (or a “double horizon” of both external and bodily space described by Merleau-Ponty, as discussed in (Katz and Csordas, 2003)). On the one hand, using a horizon analogy includes looking at everyday life in terms of one’s immediate experiences and limits within particular “life-worlds”; on the other hand, it also points to the potential and possibilities for human action beyond the life horizon (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973; Pickering, 2004; Bakardjieva, 2005). The use and presence of social robots may potentially challenge and redefine the existing inner and outer horizons in people’s daily lives and link a number of dimensions our lives are made of into entirely new configurations. Also, we propose to have as a main frame of reference not a “site” understood as a specific geographical location but rather a “living space” of a person involved. Since human living spaces are inherently symbolic spaces (Seibt et al., 2021), they refer not only to spaces people and robots (will potentially) literally cohabit, where robots bring new meanings and values into such environments (Šabanović, 2010) but also social, moral, topical and other types of individual and common spaces, whether already existing or possible in future (Taylor, 1989; Taylor, 2002), that together constitute what a person experiences as ‘life’.

With an increasing importance of the studies “in-the-wild,” HRI research often involves human subjects. The term “human subjects” can be seen as synonymous with that of “participants” in this context (the two have often been used interchangeably, including in sociology (Giddens and Griffiths, 2006) or in different research ethics guidelines (Winkle et al., 2023a)) as it refers to the “real life people,” or “living individuals” that are directly involved in the studies (Bruckman, 2002). Given the focus on the people’s everyday experiences, we propose to address the study participants in HRI as ‘subjects’ in a wider sense, particularly in line with the classical sociological conception of the subject that to a large extent refers to the “person” (Black, 2000). Interestingly, in HRI community too there have also been discussions about how to conceptualise what is meant with ‘human subject’ in relation to their role (e.g., (Onnasch and Roesler, 2021; Lee et al., 2022)) and in broader terms of participation practices in HRI research (Winkle et al., 2023b). Without neglecting the intersubjectivity aspects, different sociological perspective follow the assumption that human beings are “acting and experiencing individuals” [(Overgaard et al., 2009): 101] who play an active role in shaping their own existence and giving meanings to the experiences such an existence involves. The emphasis on human subjects also allows contextualising the subject within the concrete historical reality a given person is part of [(Wieviorka and Tomasi, 2001): 82], and concrete biographic contexts. On the one hand, the key characteristic of the subject is its capacity to, at least in principle, assert personal liberty and ability to choose, while combining the universal with the particular; on the other hand, the notion of the subject points to the inherently social and intersubjective character of human condition, since “there can be no personal subject without the recognition of the subject in the Other” [(Wieviorka and Tomasi, 2001): 83]. From an analytical point of view, the focus on the human subjects allows a number of perspectives, e.g., a focus on the subject’s activity and individual practices located within larger institutional and collective frameworks, or the study of the corporeal subject and the body as its integral part [(Wieviorka and Tomasi, 2001): 83]. It also emphasises the need to look at the actual lived experiences and meanings they have for the people and communities involved in daily life, including life with social robots. Finally, the emphasis on human subjects is well-suited for the analysis of everyday life understood in terms of ‘life-worlds’.

In order to advance our understanding of human daily life with social robots we emphasise the need to conduct HRI studies that focus on a “community.” This is because human existence in the real-world is of course always a social existence to a varying degree. Thus, in order to be accurate, HRI studies “in-the-wild” should involve more than robot interactions with single end-users to start with. We view the notion of community as more useful as, e.g., groups in this context as it allows explore unique characteristics and experiences social robots offer in their capacity for human-like engagement with people. Also, bringing focus to communities is part of the efforts to conceptualise the everyday as a reality involving concrete persons and circumstances, as opposed to “generalizable humans” (Lee et al., 2022), the approach that dominates HRI research. From an analytical point of view, community can be understood as a social unit, a process, or a way of life. The notion and experience of community inevitably changes as the human condition does (it is also one of those concepts that have long been declared dead by sociologists and yet it continues to return) (Day, 2006). For the purposes of this work, it important to note that community can be conceived as “an active process through which individuals and groups strive to realise their potential” [(Day, 2006): 21]. Also, community typically involves a sense of belonging to place and having one’s identity “wrapped up” within one’s community. This is in a situation where community is firmly embedded in the daily life of social actors involved, as it plays an important role in organising people’s day to day living (Day, 2006). Across different perspectives, the concept of community has often been associated with a notion of ‘a good life’ or otherwise positive experience (Taylor, 1989; Bauman, 2000; Day, 2006) (the approach sometimes criticised for being overly romantic when discussing traditional communities and their disappearance [(Day, 2006): 32] (Bauman, 2000)). Some works that have explicitly used such a notion in relation to social robots have also argued that the concept of a good life in this context should be understood as “a rich social life” [(Brand et al., 2023): 166]. Last but not least, communities can be seen as social and symbolic constructs that are “constituted by processes occurring close to the experience of everyday life” [(Day, 2006): 159]. From this perspective, it is people’s feelings and experiences that are the key defining characteristics of the community. The core of the communities are the processes of differentiation and identification, which includes identifying or imagining those who do and do not belong to the community based on a given criterion of similarity (Day, 2006).

On the one hand, community can be viewed as a taken-for-granted reality, and a stable setting for everyday social relationships; on the other hand, community can also be actively pursued and used as a framework for imagining and striving for a better life [(Day, 2006): 25]. Particularly in the contemporary times, definition and participation in a community becomes increasingly a matter of an individual choice and a conscious strategy rather than structural or institutional factors (Day, 2006). Therefore, we propose to conduct HRI studies that explore new elements that bring people together and serve as a common identifying criterion when dealing with social robots in daily life. More specifically, in a situation of an ever-increasing division, plurality and heterogeneity of the contemporary communities and societies as a whole, one could be asking if social robots can play a potentially unifying vs. diversifying role, or whether the realm of the everyday really is where people become “truly human persons” [(Gardiner, 2000): 2] [italics original]. This is because a largely unique feature of everyday life with social robots may be the role such robots will have in bringing our attention to otherwise taken-for-granted human qualities, and potentially redefining our understanding of what it means to be a human subject on both an individual and collective level. In other words, as part of the HRI research agenda, we propose to investigate whether a sense of humanness, as defined and experienced when sharing a daily life with social robots, can constitute an new basis for a “human togetherness” (Schloßberger, 2016) and provide a holistic perspective in the otherwise fragmented and individualised contemporary communal life.

Both SSH and HRI research are highly ambitious in their attempts to address and analyse the overarching realms of “everyday life” and “real-world” respectively. In practice however, it is possible to address only fragments of these complex and dynamic realties, and construct selective representations of the phenomena we study. The question is, e.g., not only how to increase and facilitate longitudinal studies in HRI (De Graaf et al., 2017; Ostrowski et al., 2022) [in a situation where a long-term fieldwork becomes generally less and less feasible as much for researchers as the study participants involved (Pink et al., 2020)] but also how to conceptualise and empirically investigate the everyday in a way we consider sufficiently accurate and explanatory. The very role of study participants also changes, as it has been increasingly accepted that research should be conducted “with” rather than “about” people (Pink et al., 2020) [the idea underlying participatory approaches in HRI (Šabanović, 2010)], with people actively contributing to the construction of research findings that concern them. Even when reducing the scope to studying people’s lived experiences that involve social robots, one faces multiple social, practical and technical constraints and choices that often lead to only a quick and narrow glimpse into the human everyday life. That we can only obtain approximations of the phenomena we study is of course not unique to the field of SSH or HRI (Newell, 1982; Niiniluoto et al., 1986). In the case of HRI research, the challenge is even greater as to a large extent it involves investigating and envisioning “the future” rather than the actual everyday with social robots as it is now. The condition of not knowing that underlies any investigations of the future implies that research becomes a matter of “making” rather following a predefined research design (Pink et al., 2020). Therefore, we propose to conceptualise everyday life in HRI not as a domain that is largely familiar and taken-for-granted, and where social robots are supposed to ‘fit in’ to a varying degree, but rather as a territory for research and social experimentation like never before. Also, research into human-robot futures will need to consider all the challenges, risks and ethical dilemma that potentially come with it (the issues that the HRI community has to some extent already been reflecting on, particularly with regards to good scientific practices and search for disciplinary guidelines (Rosén et al., 2021)). By fully embracing the need to “step into the unknown” (Pink et al., 2020), both in terms of theories and methods used, HRI researchers would open the doors for exploiting the novelty or “extraordinary” elements that come with social robots, and embracing ‘the unexpected’ that is inherent to the HRI research “in-the-wild” (Lee et al., 2022).