Abstract
The Belonging Robot or BeRo, is a hybrid physical-digital art installation to develop a culture of belonging, collaboration and connectedness of the students, the professors, and the employees to their educational institution. A mobile app and in-site sensory interactions relay the collective mood of these members to the physical system by changing the system's physical configurations, in what we call the Belonging Robot (BeRo). BeRo's users interact with its physical environment using pressure sensors in the form of five different colored buttons corresponding to the five different moods of users; or, the users may choose to have their inputs through a mobile app buttons of these different moods. BeRo's configurations are to reflect the five selected moods: Very Satisfied, Satisfied, Don't Know, Somewhat Satisfied, and Not Satisfied. Based on usability engineering evaluations, we will design and prototype BeRo, to create a place for interaction between students, teachers, employees and their environment, literally HCI on environmental scale! Our platforms will be iteratively designed, prototyped and evaluated on real users. In this research, we will present BeRo's concept, motivations, scenarios of operation, architecture, and the prototype of the selected system. Finally, we will present the heuristic evaluations of BeRo from 4 experts in the field of computation, robotics, and control.