HRI Card Deck Toolkit

An adversarial design workshop that runs in four steps: Setup → Create → Attack → Defend, then a shared Reflect. Each team designs a solution for the challenge, passes it to another group — who then tear it apart. The Critique deck is the weapon: each card hands the attackers an unusual evaluation lens — perspectives teams rarely think to apply themselves — so the critique cuts deeper than intuition alone. The fun is in the intensity: attackers go hard, defenders have to hold their ground, and the back-and-forth surfaces assumptions that a polite single-round session would never touch.

All card decks in this toolkit are available as ready-made downloads from the Card Library. If your workshop needs cards tailored to a specific research domain, the HRI-CARD Agent can build a custom set from a topic description or an uploaded paper — no design tools required.

What you need

The toolkit is organised into four layers: Core materials every group needs, a Challenge deck that defines the design problem, Inspiration decks drawn during the Create phase, and Critique decks used in the Attack phase.

The playboard

Each group fills one A3 playboard (landscape). The upper zone holds cards; the lower zone is your design workspace.

Running the workshop

1. S

   Setup

   Each group takes one playboard and three types of decks. Draw 1 Challenge card and place it in the Challenge section (centre upper). This is the design problem your group will solve.

2. 1

   Create — Design your system

   Draw Inspiration cards and place them in the Inspiration section (left). Use them as creative triggers to sketch your HRI concept in the lower zone: fill in Themes, Casts (the humans and robots involved), and your Idea & Storyboard.

3. 2

   Attack — Critique another team's design

   Exchange playboards with another group. Draw 3 Critique cards. Each card names a lens to evaluate the design you received. Write your critique on the front of each Critique card, then slam the cards into the Defense section of the board you're attacking.

4. 3

   Defend — Respond and refine

   Get your original playboard back with the critique cards now sitting in your Defense section. As a group: (1) refine your idea in the Idea & Storyboard, (2) write your defence on the back of each Critique card, (3) explain your defence to the other group, and (4) slam the cards back into their Defense section.

5. R

   Reflect — Together

   Close with a whole-group debrief. Three questions to guide discussion: What did we learn? What surprised us? What would we build?

Need cards for your specific research?

The pre-built decks cover general HRI contexts. If your workshop focuses on a specific domain — assistive robotics, warehouse automation, social HRI in education — use the HRI-CARD Agent to create a custom deck tailored to your research.

• Describe your research topic and the agent proposes card decks.
• Upload a research paper (PDF) and the agent extracts relevant terminology to inform the cards.
• Review, edit, and confirm each card before downloading the final .pptx for a deck.

Prefer to design cards yourself?

Download the blank .pptx card deck template and build your own decks manually in PowerPoint — useful if you want full visual control or need to match an existing house style.