Corvus Consulting

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.

This year marks my seventh as an independent consultant, and to mark the milestone I first toasted with a fancy beer, and then commissioned an update to the site’s theme. I think every product should have a story, and since I see my site as a product (as well as a sandbox), looking back at how I got here seems appropriate.

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Today is a big deal in the United States. In the midst of this historic election, there’s a lot of anxious uncertainty around the reliability of the voting process as it adapts to new technologies. At home in Vancouver, we find ourselves in the tail end of a streak of elections, from the federal level to the municipal (and likely the provincial before too long), so I’ve found myself reading and thinking about how elections work as a technology.

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