About
Keith Evan Green, R.A., Ph.D., is the Jean and Douglas McLean Professor of Human Centered Design at Cornell University. He is also a professor in Cornell's Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Robotics@Cornell, and the Graduate Field in Information Science. Green is a professionally licensed architect with degrees in architecture and psychology. He is the founder of the field of architectural robotics, which involves designing physical environments that act, think, and grow with their inhabitants. His book, Architectural Robotics: Ecosystems of Bits, Bytes and Biology (MIT Press), established the theoretical foundation for this field. Green's work has been extensively published in ACM and IEEE venues, and he has trained a generation of PhD students who now teach at leading R1 universities. At Cornell, he served as department chair and co-led the creation of the Department of Human Centered Design, which combined two smaller design programs. Previously, Green was a tenured full professor in Architecture and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University and held a tenured position in Architecture at the University of Auckland. Early in his career, he directed Clemson's architecture program in Barcelona and later founded Clemson's Institute for Intelligent Materials, Systems, & Environments and its associated Digital Ecologies graduate concentration. An award-winning architect, Green received the Schiff Foundation Prize in Architecture and Design from the Art Institute of Chicago, where his models and drawings are part of the permanent collection. He earned a B.A. in psychology and M.S. and Ph.D. in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Green has conducted research and taught extensively in Barcelona, Milan, Auckland, and Delft, where he was a Visiting Professor at TU Delft's ID-StudioLab. His research and design work focus on human needs, curiosity, and planetary survival, with applications in healthcare, creativity and learning, working life, autonomous vehicles and spacecraft, community and civic life, disaster relief, and mass urbanization. He is dedicated to understanding populations often overlooked by designers, including children, adults aging in place, underserved communities, and individuals facing illness, disabilities, and challenges related to dislocation and relocation.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Artificial Intelligence
- Human–computer interaction
- Psychology
- Engineering
- Medicine
- Operations management
- Physical medicine and rehabilitation
- Mechanical engineering
- Programming language
- Geometry
- Mathematics
Selected publications
2026-03-10 · 1 citations
articleSenior authorBrief eye contact with strangers can foster connection, belonging, and positive affect, yet such moments are often scarce in public spaces. This paper investigates how a spatially situated robot can reshape the visual field of a shared space to influence how strangers notice and respond to one another. We present MirrorBot, a mobile robot equipped with two actuated mirrors that dynamically redirect reflections to reshape sightlines between people. In a study with 32 strangers in 16 pairs in a waiting-room setting, MirrorBot elicited patterns such as low-stakes icebreaking, nonverbal synchrony, joint sensemaking, asymmetric engagement, and avoidance. Participants also attributed multiple roles to the robot, such as mediator, observer, magnifier, or disrupter, revealing that its social meaning was fluid and co-constructed. Our work extends HRI by showing that robots can act not only as conversational partners but also as spatial mediators, curating opportunities for human–human connection through the reconfiguration of spatial relationships
2026-04-13 · 2 citations
articleOpen accessSenior authorDental clinics can be challenging sensory environments, creating discomfort and stress, especially for neurodivergent individuals with Sensory Processing Disorder. Interactive environmental systems offer potential to transform these spaces, providing adaptable, sensory-inclusive experiences. However, the design space for environment-based interventions in dental settings remains largely unexplored. To address this, we conducted in-depth 2-hour co-design sessions with 13 neurodivergent participants to explore environment-based strategies to meet diverse sensory needs. We identified five core design goals for inclusive dental environments: experience transformation, distraction, exposure management, restoration, and social facilitation. Our technology-agnostic design catalogue can inform multiple implementation approaches, including projection mapping, ambient displays, and responsive physical elements. We contribute design patterns for interactive environmental systems, methodological insights for participatory design with neurodivergent communities, and demonstrate how tangible materials serve as proxies for environmental interventions, with implications for Augmented Reality system design. This study advances inclusive design practices and highlights co-designing with neurodivergent individuals.
2026-04-13 · 1 citations
articleOpen accessSenior authorEye contact between strangers, even fleeting, can spark interaction and foster connection, happiness, and belonging. Yet in public spaces, such encounters are often suppressed by “civil inattention,” with many people absorbed in their phones. We explore how reconfiguring the ambient environment with MirrorBot, a mobile robot with adaptive mirrors, can encourage social encounters by subtly redirecting glances. By shifting reflections between self- and mutual recognition, MirrorBot invites serendipitous eye contact, shared awareness, and low-stakes engagement. In a controlled 2×2 between-subjects study with 90 participants (45 dyads) across four conditions (MirrorBot, Bot-only, Mirror-only, and Control), we found that MirrorBot led participants to initiate conversation more often, feel greater closeness and togetherness, and have more enjoyable interactions. Our findings position robots not only as social agents but as socio-spatial interfaces that choreograph sight lines and shared attention in physical space, opening new possibilities for technologies that cultivate human connection in public life.
Reconfiguring the Home: Co-Designing the Future of Adaptive Domestic Environments
2026-04-13 · 2 citations
articleOpen accessSenior authorAs domestic environments are increasingly required to meet diverse and changing human needs within constrained spaces, physical reconfigurability offers a promising solution. We developed a full-scale, manipulable room prototype as an exploratory co-design instrument, enabling participants to bodily explore and reflect on reconfigurable living spaces. Through 12 sessions with 30 participants involving brainstorming, bodystorming, and interviews, we identified spatial design patterns and elicited perspectives on reconfigurable domestic environments. Our findings contribute a design pattern catalogue for reconfigurable spaces, alongside insights into the lived experience of reconfigurability. We also discuss design principles, three affordance-based design dimensions that capture value tensions: empowering vs. restrictive, utilitarian vs. hedonic, and futuristic vs. practical, as well as lessons from co-design with a room-scale prototype. We demonstrate agile, room-scale prototyping as a methodological approach for spatial HCI research, advancing toward human-computer habitation, where interactive systems become inhabited built environments that support human values, creativity, and autonomy.
2025-04-23 · 6 citations
articleSenior author2025-08-25
articleSenior authorThis paper presents Light Everywhere, a robotic lighting system that enhances flexibility in domestic spaces by traversing walls and ceilings to provide real-time, task-based illumination. We report a field investigation, an online study, and a between-subjects experiment (N=26) using the WoZ approach comparing Light Everywhere with a conventional desk lamp, evaluating perceived comfort, control, and spatial utilization. Results show the robot supports adaptive behaviors and dynamic space usage. Findings highlight the potential of robotic lighting to redefine housing flexibility and user-driven environmental control, "shedding light" on a novel HRI and smart home design.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · 2025-06-05 · 2 citations
articleSenior authorCentral to the human experience is establishing a connection with individuals who are unfamiliar with one another—strangers. We describe results from a field study that deployed SocialStools , a socio-spatial interface with mixed-reality experience, to support ice-breaking between strangers in a public space. Synthesizing existing social psychology theories, we propose a human behavior framework with distinct, interconnected behavioral components, and then apply this framework as an instrument to analyze the “ice-breaking” process amongst 81 strangers assigned to 27 groups using SocialStools . Our analysis identifies recurring behavioral patterns that demonstrate the fluid and emergent nature of interpersonal spatial adjustments, emphasizing the dynamic aspects of proxemics. Our contributions are the results of our empirical field study with a socio-spatial interface that advances our understanding of how strangers interact when uninstructed, and a theory-based, behavioral framework—an analytical instrument to examine the dynamic experience of ice-breaking.
2025-08-25 · 1 citations
articleSenior authorWhile robots are traditionally envisioned as physical entities that move through, sense, and act upon the environment, a new category is emerging: the inhabitable robot, or "robot-room," which redefines human-robot interaction by immersing us within the robot itself. As a first step in exploring this novel design space, we developed a full-scale, rapid-prototyped robot-room—not a simulation or scale model—and conducted a co-design study with 30 participants. Inside this immersive space, participants explored new forms of human-robot interaction, engaging their perceptual faculties for "knowing spaces." Our findings inform our ongoing development of a fully operational robot-room and offer valuable insights into expanding the concept of human-robot interaction to one of human-robot cohabitation.
2025-08-25
articleSenior authorWe explore speculation ("wondering about how things could be") as a pedagogical tool for teaching HRI. We focus on the potential of speculation to create spaces for discussion and debate on future HRI scenarios. Drawing particularly on dystopian fiction, students are encouraged to imagine human-robot interactions that offer alternative, "possible futures" in response to the negative consequences of technology. This approach challenges traditional user-centered design by guiding students to prototype complex HRI systems. To illustrate this, we introduce the motivations for and the process of our approach and present case studies from our own course delivery. While our case study centers on designing robotic environments–an emerging subfield of HRI–we see the approach as broadly applicable to the design of social robots and other embodied forms of robotics.
Smart Assistive Design Concepts for Enhancing Independent Living in Domestic Environments
2024-09-16
book-chapterSenior authorNumerous studies have shown that clutter can negatively affect people’s health and well-being. Understanding human organizational behavior in domestic environments is a vital step in creating a smart, sustainable architectural vision for the future. By embedding assistive technologies in architecture, we can enhance the ambient environment to improve life quality. This chapter illustrates this vision by introducing a multi-robot, wall-climbing organizer system called SORT, aimed to assist a broad range of users in managing personal items at home, particularly for those who are affected by various mobility impairments. Here, we report on the iterative process of designing and fabricating the robot group, followed by a user study that confirmed the usability of our prototypes. Qualitative insights provided here can help future design researchers better understand user’s organizational behaviors, decision-making, and logic hierarchies, preferences on robot number and speed, and perception of robot gestures. Finally, we present an illustration showing how the robots may form a suite with other domestic assistants to leverage and enhance the ambient environment. The work reported here represents a step forward in exploring smart designs with enabling technologies and user studies in human-environment interaction for everyday spaces, with an aim to improving life quality.
Recent grants
NSF · $200k · 2013–2016
SHB: Small: An Assistive, Robotic Table [ART] Promoting Independent Living
NSF · $271k · 2011–2015
NSF · $606k · 2016–2021
Frequent coauthors
- 23 shared
Ian D. Walker
University of Wyoming
- 11 shared
Johnell O. Brooks
- 10 shared
Anthony L. Threatt
- 9 shared
Yixiao Wang
Wuhan University of Technology
- 8 shared
Deanna Kocher
Sibley Memorial Hospital
- 7 shared
Jessica Merino
Clemson University
- 7 shared
Paul Yanik
Western Carolina University
- 6 shared
Elena Sabinson
University of Colorado Boulder
Education
PhD
University of Pennsylvania
Awards & honors
- Honorable Mention Best Paper, 2023 CHI Conference on Human F…
- Kazuo Tanie Best Paper Award, 2018 Designing Interactive Sys…
- Best Paper, 2020 Interaction Design and Children (IDC '20 Ex…
- Best Demo Paper, 2014 IEEE Pervasive Computing
- Best Paper, 2014 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computin…
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