Elmo: An Embodied Conversational Assistant For Community Repair Cafés
Teresa Castle-Green, Simon D Castle-Green, Joseph Lindley, Neelima Sailaja, Susan Lechelt · 2025
Repair cafés provide a community service that supports and empowers item ‘Bringers’ to reinstate traditional values of repair in order to reduce climate impacts of waste. In this paper, we report on a pilot study exploring the use of Elmo (an embodied conversational assistant) by volunteer Repairers within repair café settings. Our findings show the different ways Repairers incorporated this technology probe into their work and the challenges they faced in doing so. Through this, we contribute three areas of consideration for designers looking to implement conversational assistants into community repair settings. These include, contextual awareness of time to undertake suggestions and of the related repair café processes, motivation and customer relations requirements of volunteer Repairers, and enhancing empowerment work through supporting current practices and demonstrations of navigating trouble in repair-resource interactions.