Social Robots

About Engage
ENGAGE is bringing together industry, research and design in the field of affective engineering, to create a knowledge community and realise best use of both current and future knowledge.
The ENGAGE consortium consists of 21 project partners from 9 European countries, working together to make sure all the ENGAGE objectives are successfully reached.
ENGAGE is funded by the European 6th Framework Programme

Background
For most companies innovation is costly and the failure rate of new product introductions is high. 40% of new product introductions fail in the marketplace (Hultink, 1997). Although functionality has always been, and will remain, an essential precondition for product satisfaction and market success, various developments point at an increasing importance of product experience as a driving force of product acquisition and use. Today the bottleneck in introducing new successful products quickly to the market has moved from factory floor manufacturing to the product specification, design & evaluation process, although of course world-class manufacturing remains essential.
Besides functional benefit, consumers may be looking for:
-Social benefit: the product's association with social class / status
-Hedonic benefit: to meet a need for enjoyment, fun and pleasure
-Affective benefit: to arouse emotions
-Epistemic benefit: to satisfy curiosity

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