Corvus Consulting

Over the holidays, I decided to make 2009 a year to explore the more physical side of interaction design. That thought is largely inspired by the Touch platform found in the iPhone and iPod Touch, and to some extent in the trackpad gestures showing up in the latest Macbooks. It’s also driven by my belief that interaction design is going to become a much more physical enterprise with… the rise of robots! Woooo…. read on, for more than ironic futurism gags.

The most common real-world automaton is still the single-purpose robot: assembling in factories, exploring on Mars, vacuuming the living room. The robot’s current lot seems to be one of dangerous places and mundane business. In other words, what people don’t like to or can’t be around.

Ambassador Asimo

But that removal from everyday human life is changing, and quickly. Consider Asimo, Honda’s ambassador of robot-human relations. This playfully spaceman-like robot is usually found dancing or serving drinks on stage at tech events, often with a young and attractive female handler who shows us, by surviving the encounter, that we have nothing to fear. Asimo is now moving up in the cultural world, most recently as a 50-foot hat-tipping float at the 2008 Rose Parade. Check out this bit from the event description:

The creation called “Hats Off in Celebration” will be completed with natural materials like lettuce seed, rice, carnations and strawflower. The float will be joined by the Prairie View A&M University Marching Band, a past participant in the Honda Battle of the Bands featuring the music programs of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

A cultural critic could have a field day with that, but I think these happenings are real and unconscious hints to where we’re heading. Seeing Asimo, a working humanoid machine and not just a sci-fi creation, in an event as non-tech the Rose Parade makes the idea of robots in our everyday lives a bit more normal. How normal is it getting?

Very, according to Rodney Brooks in his 2003 TED Talk about robotics. Dr. Brooks discusses how the ubiquitous personal and embedded computer started out as commercial products in games and toys and hobby kits. Before long we saw a computer here and there, and then, almost suddenly, everywhere. Of course, it wasn’t sudden, it just seemed that way. In Asimo at the Rose Parade, I see one of those little signposts that point to Robots, Everywhere.

Consider the following handful of factoids from a CBC article on robots among us:

…increasingly, robots are creeping into the mainstream, and so too does our contact with them. The U.S. company iRobot said it has sold more than two million Roombas, the autonomous home vacuum cleaners. In the January issue of Scientific American, Microsoft founder Bill Gates… painted a picture of millions of personal robots, a sentiment echoed by the Japan Robot Association, which predicts that by 2025, the personal robot industry will be worth about 6 trillion yen (about $52 billion Cdn.).

It’s no wonder, then, that the South Korean government — which has its own ambitious goal of a robot in every home by 2013 — announced earlier this year it would be crafting a “Robot Ethics charter” to govern the roles robots might occupy in society.

More Touching

Since robots are all about interaction in the physical world, interacting with the human physical world will certainly involve our sense of touch. The way that a robotic product incorporates touch into its interactions with people will be critical to its success, so it’s not surprising that touch is a huge part of modern robotics research.

Among the first people to have intimate contact with robots will be the eldest members of society. The Paro therapeutic robot is part product, part experiment, and was profiled in the documentary Mechanical Love.

Paro, a robotic baby seal, has a limited set of interactions that include sight, sound, and of course touch. Like pet therapy but without the problems associated with using animals, Paro has shown that strides in emotional health can be made with the right interactions. If you can watch the videos without feeling a tug at your heart, I’ll know you’re a robot.

Closer to surreality, a second thread from the documentary looks at Hiroshi Ishiguro’s attempts to build a robot replica of himself. He employs family members to explore the acceptability of the robot in emotionally-driven interactions. At one point, Hiroshi pokes and pushes his android’s face. The android responds by turning away from the annoyance. The movements are mechanical, but the reaction is instantly recognizable. Even at early stages, touch is a critical part of the interface.

That idea is taken even further in this Japanese news video of a baby-like robot model that not only responds to touch, but has pliant skin to make it more tactile. It’s kind of creepy, but worth looking past the weird to see the important parts.

Back in 2009, we’re still mostly designing software that works in the boundaries of the screen, and typically address the senses of sight, and to a lesser extent sound. I’ve always believed, though, that the because the motivations and outcomes of the software experiences we create are often found outside the applications themselves, they must be understood in order for a design to succeed. The touchable interface, not as an innovation but as a staple of interaction, is soon to be part of our toolkits. And, as with concepts like Don Norman’s Emotional Design, the earlier we embrace these aspects of human experience, the better the experiences we’ll be positioned to create with our coming robot masters, I mean helpers.