The research fields of interest of the Synthetic Method in Robotic Design workshop are: Social, Cognitive, and Developmental Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction, (Robotic) Design, Epistemology of the Sciences of the Artificial, and Philosophy of Science, among others. 
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Some of the debated questions will be:

• Is it possible to define a set of human and/or animal social body parts or dynamics that can be considered essential (pre-)conditions of “social presence” and/or “social competences” in robotic agents? Can they be implemented in robotic agents? If yes, how? 
• Should “artificial sociality” be rooted in human and/or animal sociality? Or should it be ideated and developed as a new form of sociality? What could be the origins and grounds of a specifically robotic sociality? What kind of morphology and body dynamics should it involve?
• Is it advantageous to implement human and/or animal sociality in robots? To what extent? Are there situations in which the reference to human and/or animal sociality, based on human-like and/or animal-like morphology and body dynamics, results disadvantageous? What are these situations? How can we avoid them?  
• Are there scientific (experimental) explorations that allow us to investigate the differences between robotic “social presence” and “social competences” grounded in human-like and /or animal-like sociality, and robotic “social presence” and “social competences” based on other grounds?