Co-Creating Buildable and Open Social Robot Study Companions with University Students

Synthesis: Design for Assembly (DfA) and Design for Disassembly (DfD) interventions reshape how a build feels before they shorten how long it takes.

Key Findings

• Across two studies with developers and first-time builders, system usability climbed from Poor to Excellent (SUS 59.4 → 89.4).
• Perceived workload trended downward (NASA-TLX 4.29 → 4.00), and mean assembly time trended downward (21.4 → 13.7 minutes, with a learning effect among junior builders).
• Perceived workload, not completion time, appears to govern whether students take up open hardware.
• Orientation cues and navigation continuity for first-time builders emerged as the next documentation frontier.

Study Design & Method

Open-source social robots offer Accessibility, repairability, and student empowerment, yet the build itself often presents a barrier: existing platforms either ship pre-assembled, foreclosing hands-on learning, or expose students to unfamiliar fasteners, opaque wiring, and inaccessible service points that erode engagement. Working with university students in Guyana and Estonia, the authors applied the Double Diamond framework to co-create the Robot Study Companion (RSC) v4.1: mapping pain points, then redesigning its chassis around twist-lock fasteners, snap-fit joints, and tool-free service latches. The redesign was evaluated across two studies with both developers and first-time builders using the System Usability Scale (SUS) and the NASA-TLX workload instrument.

What this means for practice

• Instructors. Select a buildable platform on perceived workload rather than clock time: first-time builders took 39.1 minutes (SD = 7.5) to assemble and still rated the hardware Good (SUS 74.6), so the binding constraint is how heavy the build feels, not how long it takes.
• Instructors. Add an explicit part-identification and wiring step to the session, and label the physical parts: wiring and part identification accounted for the residual Mental Demand reported by end users, and one participant asked for labeled parts to reduce mental load.
• Instructors. Pair video guidance with static step-by-step diagrams: six of seven participants named video the most helpful feature, yet the pause-act-rewind cycle made Orientation and Navigation the lowest-scoring documentation subscale.
• Instructors. Test tool-free service access during onboarding: all seven participants reached the RPi's SD/USB ports, but one needed a prompt to locate the SD card slot and another initially missed the side-panel port latches.
• Designers. Build tactile feedback into snap-fit joints and add hooks or compartments for wiring: first-time builders feared breaking the snap-fit components (a concern absent among the developers) and struggled to fit wires inside the housing.

Limitations

• Study 1 benchmarked the RSC development team itself: four developers, two of them senior, evaluating a redesign they had worked on, which the authors flag as self-evaluation bias.
• Study 2 validated only v4.1 with seven students from two partner universities (Guyana n = 4, Tartu n = 3), so user-side gains cannot be quantified as a within-subjects delta.
• Study 1's task order may have inflated v4 performance through practice transfer, and the deliberately thinned alpha-stage v4.1 documentation means the cross-version documentation clarity scores do not fully reflect documentation quality.
• Thematic coding lacked inter-rater reliability checks, and the single-session design cannot capture long-term attachment or perceived agency.

Citation

Baksh, F., Zorec, M. B., Baksh, F., & Kruusamäe, K. (2026). Co-Creating Buildable and Open Social Robot Study Companions with University Students. ICSR + ART 2026, London.