Cute little things
This is Keepon. He’s a robot by a company called BeatBots LLC who’s core philosophy is based on cute simple things to help destroy the notion of the robot as something to be feared.
I’d seen it before but I feel it fits nicely into what I’ve been talking about recently. Small, cute things are much easier for us to engage with emotionally - and that that’s what seems to be missing from technology at the moment.
Love.
Years ago now I remember reading about a design project at MIT to create an alarm clock that you love. It’s an alarm clock that runs and hides when it goes off so you have to get up and look for it in order to turn it off. It had been designed to behave like a pesky pet that you couldn’t help but forgive.
Recently I saw Moon. It’s great. You should watch it. The robot, GERTY is super advanced and non humanoid with completely believable emotional responses, but it uses a simple face that somehow softens the blow when it’s delivering horrific news to the main character.
I think it’s because the simple face helps you to empathise with it.
This brings me back to the point i made here about Scott Mcloud’s understanding comics.
A detailed face is definitely someone else, but a simple face could be anyone - including us. It’s easier for humans to apply emotional characteristics to something that looks less like someone else and more like the blurry image we have of our own features when we’re not looking in a mirror.
Back to the little yellow guy. People are much more likely to be amazed if something simple does really cool stuff too. Let’s say Keepon was capable of using the little cameras in his eyes to monitor your house for movement while you were away. If it detected anything moving it would start filming and uploading the video to the web. You’d be amazed, right? I would. What if Keepon was 6 foot tall and humanoid? Less amazing, almost expected.
On the other hand if it was expected to do something important and got it wrong would you be able to hate it as much as the 6 foot humanoid robot? Especially if it went all sad and doe eyed. Probably not.
