Service robots – autonomous systems that perform personal and professional tasks – have become a common sight in the Global North. In Human-robot interaction (HRI), researchers rarely consider the design implications of service robots for people with disabilities (PwDs) beyond controlled assistive contexts, such as private homes and assisted living facilities. Nevertheless, the purview of PwDs transcends assistive contexts: PwDs know from lived experience that autonomous innovations can cause real harm to members of the disabled community when deployed. Therefore, considering the lived experiences of PwDs, many of whom exist at the social margins of society, can enable the design of inclusive service robots. Even so, robotics design practice can be exclusionary for people who are neither roboticists nor robot design practitioners.

Participatory Design (PD), or cooperative design (“co-design”), an equitable approach aimed at shifting power relations and integrating community interests in design processes outcomes, is becoming commonplace in HRI. However, HRI design practitioners who work with PwDs seldom interrogate whose lived experiences are represented in the design process – commonly privileging the experiences of professionals, such as technical experts and medical practitioners; this further encodes normative biases about how PwDs may want robots to behave around them or the types of support they may desire. Instead, HRI design practitioners should center on the experience-as-knowledge of members of the disabled community within co-design processes.

In this thesis, I present the lived experiences as a PD methodological framework for designing service robots with disabled adults. I demonstrate the application of this framework by co-designing service robots with disabled adults across three domains: assistive navigation, last-mile delivery, and mental well-being. I highlight the principles of the lived experience framework, which reflects an onto-epistemological commitment to re-position the experience-as-expertise of PwDs, including shifting power towards PwDs through accessible design communication; highlighting power relations, embracing tensions, and fostering meaningful engagements with PwDs with intersecting social marginalization; and encouraging reflexivity in the co-design process. Furthermore, I offer design guidelines and socio-technical considerations for developers and design practitioners who wish to create inclusive service robots and equitable human-robot experiences. This work is a purposeful demonstration of the meaningful contributions made by democratizing the design of enabling, yet disruptive, autonomous systems and a call-to-action for HRI practitioners who seek renewed commitments to PD as a transformative framework.