Living With Robots: A Speculative Design Approach

2012198044 Horyun Song

On Design

• Design is…“A plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose.” -Charles Eames

From Laboratories to Homes• Domestication

- Traditional: Taming a wild animal & House-trained

- General: Integrated into the structures, daily routines and values of users and their environments

• Coming of robots as consumable product

• Complex human issues: Desires and idiosyncrasies of the intended audience audience and the fluctuations of fashion and trends

Utility and Post Utility• Utility object: Form and function defined by the

satisfying of tangible and relatively stable human needs

• Post utility object: Governed by a much more complex and extremely ephemeral set of criteria.

• Understanding of US , 우리!

- Embrace the genuine complexity and transience of human needs and desires

Maladaptation• Why robots are not becoming products?

- Functional adaptation

✴ Utilitarian vs. Aesthetic, Where is niche for robots?

✴ For labour-saving, too costly

- Form adaptation

✴ Familiarity vs. Fictional

- Interactive adaptation

✴ Most are operated in highly artificial environment

✴ Real human interaction is different

Speculative Design• Remove the constraints from the commercial sector

that define normative design processes

Living with Robots

• What would robots do in the home?

• How could we and our homes adapt to a robot’s needs?

• How could robots adapt to the home?

• How can we begin to understand the ethical implications of bringing robots into the home?

Do What?

• Neo-naturalists by Neil Usher

- Robots looking for faces in the clouds and four-leaved clover in the fields

- Different application: Pointless, but emotional

- Beyond military and lab usage

Homes Adapt to Robots

• With Robots by Diego Trujillo

- Home sympathetic to the limitation of robots

- Why design a complex robot, when you can redesign the cup?

- Objects are designed for robots, while serving the function for human usage

Robots Adapt to Homes

• Dunne and Raby: Technological Dream Series: No. 1, Robots

- Don’t look like conventional robots, rather function oriented and domestic

- Not omnipresent and overtly smart

✴ subservient, intimate, dependent, and equal

Robots Adapt to Homes

• James Chambers: Attenborough Design Group

- Updating familiar objects to have kinetic behaviour

- Response to the environment (Survival)

- Emotional relationship with owner

Robots Adapt to Homes• Natalie Jeremijenko: Feral

Robotic Dogs

- Twig the program and sensor to me the robotic dogs NOT predictable

- Seek out potential danger in environment

- Give value far beyond original devices

Ethical Implications• Carnivorous Domestic

Entertainment Robots, Auger-Loizeau

- Feed off living organisms (insects) for electrical energy (clock)

- Artificial companions

- Ethical issues

Remember Them?

Or Him?

Critique and Discussion

• Robot as companion?

• Are we ready for them?

• Far-fetched?