Corvus Consulting

Fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are familiar with the Infinite Improbability Drive, a spacecraft engine fuelled by the energy of highly improbably events.

Fans of this blog (both of them) will be keen to learn about the Corvus Irony Timing Chain, which prevents me from writing year-in-review posts until a few days after New Years. The Chain makes space for the news that would have contradicted, enhanced or otherwise changed what I was going write. This exclusive innovation lets me write without having to look back on a post less than a week old and feel like a dupe.

Safely a few short steps into 2011, we can look back on 2010 for what it was: an exciting year that delivered a number of inflection points.

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Last year I wrote that interaction designers will soon find themselves expanding the craft to mediate human-robot experiences, where the instructions of software become physical actions in the real world.

Consider how computers entered our lives across a few decades: first as far-away leviathans in research labs, then to lonely occupants of special rooms in companies, then to every desk and now to every pocket. Here, there, then suddenly everywhere, and robots seem poised to follow the same curve.

I’ve been waiting to see signs of this wave touching the shore of mass culture, and that happens in a new commercial from Honda. Have a watch.

Honda has not hidden its interest in robotics, with Asimo visiting conferences and other press-heavy events, but has always relegated it to the realm of ‘just research’. With this ad, that gradual rebranding shifts gears, gently humanizing Asimo with Canadian interests, getting us used to the idea of a robot from Honda as part of our lives.