As computers begin to move away from screen-based interfaces and become cheaper and more pervasive, their systems will inevitably become more intricate and complex. Our current modes of communication may become insufficient. Human beings utilize emotions to transform intelligence into appropriate action, to consider circumstances and relationships with others. If our computers can develop stronger emotional connections to their users, our interactions with them will become more meaningful and can develop along with the progress of technology.
WHAT:
Emoti-bots are a line of prototypical products for future homes that simulate and stimulate emotion. They are experiments developed in an effort to transform common everyday objects into potential interfaces for computing. They look to the affordances and current uses of those objects to develop more natural, instinctive and emotional methods of human-computer interaction.
WHY:
Our products are meant to argue against traditional western views toward robotics and common assumptions about the objects within which our future technologies will be built. Our project seeks to question the potential of the objects around us and envision them as evolved future objects. It seeks to challenge common fears surrounding robots and their elevated integration into our daily lives. We hope to push the boundary of what role we see robots playing in our lives and negate tendencies to regard them as slaves or servants, but rather look to them as cohabitants. The idea of simulating emotion in our objects is cemented in the idea that emotion plays a significant role in human intelligence. Intelligence is not only the ability to acquire knowledge, but also to apply it appropriately.
HOW:
Psychological research has proven that people already anthropomorphize most objects around them. We think of things in human terms because we are human. There is a very fine line, however, between that which we understand and is intuitive, and that which freaks us out and falls into the phenomenon of the Uncanny Valley. When things begin to look and act very human-like, we expect them to function exactly as humans do, and when they don't, we perceive that as weird. Therefore, we aimed to deviate from that gray area, specifically avoiding adding any human-like physical attributes to them, especially faces. Our products borrow from innate human behaviors to create intuitive and natural interactions, but never seek to fully replicate or replace them.
Because our products are based in the idea of ubiquitous computing and look to a world in which computers exist nearly everywhere, they cannot be overwhelming or take control. The concept of calm computing was developed to express a world in which humans could calmly interact with so much technology surrounding them. The theory suggests interfaces in which the interactions with the machine can transition smoothly between the focus of your attention and your periphery. Allowing computing to become something that exists everywhere, but doesn't necessarily have to be paid a lot of or even any attention to perform its functions. We sought to model our products after this theory to reinforce the idea of them being unthreatening and to prove the validity of their existence within a world of ubiquitous computing.
To maintain consistency across all of our prototypes, we created a rule set for each of our designs to adhere to. The rules function as both guidelines for us as designers as well as guidelines for our users in understanding how the objects function and why.
These rules are as follows:
- All products should utilize a current everyday object as the basis of their design.
- All products should borrow from nature and/or innate human behaviors in some way.
- All products should avoid the use of any physical human attributes in their design.
- All products should react to human presence in some way, making their responsiveness immediately apparent.
- All products should be designed to emphasize the emotional connection as part of the functionality of the object.
- All products should have subtle first actions and then become more insistent over time.
- All products should have some small element of randomness or unpredictability, but users should never assume it is broken.
- All products should respect their original functionality and affordances above any and all added functionality or technology.
- All products should be able to consider task management and understand an order of importance among those tasks.
- All products should remain functional at all times, regardless of their emotional state.