Robots with us, not like us: designing robotic otherness through scent in ScentDia

Abstract

This article addresses the diffusion of social robots not merely as technological innovation, but as an emerging transformation that may reshape human social environments, interactional patterns, and modes of coordination. To orient this transformation towards social sustainability, we propose a twofold contribution grounded in difference and complementarity rather than imitation and substitution. First, we advance a transdisciplinary paradigm for social robotics, termed “robots with us, not like us,” articulated through three interconnected components: peri-human design , which proposes an alternative to anthropomorphic design based on compatible difference; perceptual identity markers , understood as design operators that make robotic otherness perceptually and socially legible while stabilising identity across interactions; and futuring social robotics , a synthetic methodology for exploring emerging forms of human–robot sociality. Second, we materialise this paradigm in ScentDia, an artistic social robot that uses scent as a perceptual identity marker to investigate olfaction as a medium of social presence. As it encounters humans, ScentDia modulates specific (non-biological, non-human) olfactory stimuli to signal its robotic identity and establish a clear form of compatible otherness, leveraging olfaction as a channel for recognition, orientation, and affective attunement. Together, the paradigm and its material instantiation introduce olfactory social robotics as a programmatic research direction, exploring how a socially sustainable human–robot world may be shaped through the valorisation of difference.