Trust, Safety, and Graceful Failure
Trust as a Design Material
In everyday language, trust is a feeling. In HRI design, trust is a behavioral state.
Trust determines whether a user will delegate a task to a robot. It dictates whether they will work alongside it without obsessively monitoring it. Trust determines whether your robot gets used as intended, worked around, or abandoned after a single error.
This operational definition matters because it makes trust designable. If trust is just a feeling, there is nothing a designer can do beyond trying to "make it nicer." But if trust is a behavioral state resulting from specific interactions, you can design it, measure it, and optimize it.
Trust is an engineering outcome, but it is primarily a communication design problem. A robot can be technically flawless, but if it cannot communicate its intent, it will never be trusted.
