Preprint of a manuscript currently under peer review.Submitted for journal review on 20 July 2025. Abstract The accelerating diffusion of social robots, far from merely signifying a technological innovation, marks a profound social transformation — one that risks destabilizing the fabric of human sociality. In this work, we address the challenge of making this transformation socially sustainable by proposing a transdisciplinary paradigm for social robotics. Combining robotics, art, and philosophy, we advance an epistemological, methodological, ethical, and aesthetic framework to design robots for difference and social coordination, rather than human imitation and substitution. We articulate this paradigm — “building robots not like us, but with us” — through three main contributions: (a) the notion of a peri-human design space, which situates robots in a domain where their social presence and interactions are deeply different yet fundamentally compatible; (b) the concept of perceptual identity markers, which make robots’ otherness immediately recognizable to human senses; and (c) futuring social robotics, a methodology for creating and staging robotic agents-to-come, engaging us in the experience of prospective hybrid human–robot social ecosystems. We ground this paradigm in ScentDia, an artistic social robot that establishes and explores olfaction as a perceptual, technological, and cultural scaffold for robotic social presence. Drawing on evolutionary roots of human sociality, ScentDia engages humans through a scent — neither biological nor human-like — that signals its robotic identity. As a pioneering robot with an olfactory identity marker, ScentDia invites us to rethink what it means to interact socially with robotic agents, and to confront a central question: what we want — and may — become in sharing our social world with these agents.
Damiano et al. (Fri,) studied this question.