CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/23/2017

Can a robot be neurotic, helpless or needy? Hello, Robot!

“Faced with a future that will soon be populated by a multitude of robots,” Tina Thiel writes in Hello, Robot, “the designers Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby ask how we will interact with these robots in daily life and what relationships we will enter into with them. In their view, the idea of robots that simply relieve us of work ultimately falls short of the mark. For the series Technological Dream, therefore, they designed four robots—all non-human in appearance—with different personality structures: an annular, autonomic robot, a neurotic robot in the form of a receptive funnel, a guard robot with which you have to maintain eye contact for a long time before it trusts you enough to share its data, and finally a robot that is intelligent but also helpless and needy.” Featured image is of Robot 3, “Sentinel,” 2007.