Vanderschantz, NicholasTurner, Jessica DawnKonig, Jemma LynetteTimpany, ClaireSiddika, RafeeaShakes, Nathan2026-06-152026-06-152026Vanderschantz, N., Turner, J., Konig, J., Timpany, C., Siddika, R., & Shakes, N. (2026). Sketching social robots: Visualising futures of human–robot interaction through participatory imagination. DRS 2026: Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.28222398-3132https://hdl.handle.net/10289/18347In this paper, we explore sketching as a speculative and reflective practice for imagining social robots. Through a series of participatory design workshops, participants observed two prototype robots and then produced sketches and word maps envisioning possible appearances, behaviours, and social roles for robots in everyday life. Analysing the artefacts of these workshops reveals how non-expert human users perceive and imagine future robots in their worlds. We examine common themes of emotion, familiarity, discomfort, and relational values in the artefacts produced by the workshop participants. Our work highlights a way that sketching and written idea generation by non-designers can serve as a tool for thinking through affective, aesthetic, and relational possibilities in human-robot interaction. By situating sketching as a medium for speculative imagination rather than technical specification, our paper contributes to an emerging understanding of Sketching Futures as a relational, situated, and iterative process.enRe-use licence for this version: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/social robotsHRIrobot aestheticsparticipatory designresearch-through-designConference Contribution10.21606/drs.2026.282246 Information and Computing Sciences4608 Human-Centred Computing