The history of User Experience (UX) is a reactive one. Long before the term was coined, let alone developed into a robust set of tools and frameworks, people were fighting back against the cold, dehumanizing doctrines of Taylorism and Ford’s assembly line. These methods treated people like cogs in a machine. Yet due to their…
Category: Robotics
Robots As Social Influencers: The Future of Persuasive Technology
Who owns or sets the mandate of this technology? What are its objectives? What approaches can it use? What data does it access?
Automate with Caution: Learnings from a History of Dehumanization
This article was originally published in my role as a Fellow with the Human Futures Studio. As a researcher in Human-Robot Interaction, a lecturer in digital transformation, and a historian of all things automated, I am constantly surprised by the consistent failure of organizations deploying automation. I speak broadly here of automation: technologies that execute…
Automating Manipulation
I know how to control you with a robot. Or at least, I’m learning to. Though I suppose what I really mean to say is that my robots and AI are. If this doesn’t scare the crap out you, it should. Not because we suddenly have technology that we can use to subtly manipulate people…
The Choice Not to Think
To think, or not to think, that is the question. Technological advancements have nearly always come with the promise of making our lives easier, taking a burden off our shoulders, and freeing up more time and mindshare for us to use as we see fit. As the current wave of automation technologies (AI, robotics, IoT,…
Robot-Centered Design
The future of user-centered design with a new kind of stakeholder You’re a designer. You create products, experiences, services, buildings, and more. Each time you begin the design process, you consider the multitude of touchpoints and features of your design and how they engage with your intended user. This is the logic of the Human-Centered…
Robotic Scapegoating
As a robotics guy, the most common question I get is also one of my least favourite: “Are robots going to take over the world?” I hear it with such frequency that I’ve developed the formulaic response, “only if I tell them to.” While my playful side loves uttering this phrase with a half-maniacal grin,…
The End of Purpose: Robotic Implications
The whole point of robotics is to make our lives easier. Designers aim to take steps out of someone’s day (drive your car, prep your meal, brush your teeth, etc.) and transfer that responsibility to a machine of some kind. In theory, this setup sounds ideal – the more mundane tasks we can transfer to…
Half Man, Half Machine, All Centaur
A robot is going to steal your job. AI is only a handful of years away from being smarter than you. The bot uprising is coming to enslave or kill us all. Deep learning is creating code that we can’t understand. The great digital divide is coming. Maybe. Or maybe there is another path forward….
Talking to Yourself: Deconstructing Chatbots
Scanning is a tool used in foresight to uncover weak signals that herald shifts within different industries, behavioral changes, and other emerging movements that will shape the future. To uncover the types of signals that give way to true breakthroughs, our goal must not simply be breadth of exploration, but also depth of analysis if…
Robotic UX is Playing God
And I, for one, am both wildly excited and extremely terrified. This isn’t simply because of my twisted delusions of supernatural infallibility, or the fact that I still daydream about taking over the world with an army of mechanized minions. Nay, I’m interested in experience design for robots because it gives us the opportunity to…
Dear Manufacturing, Do it Yourself: Industry 4.0 and Self-Assembling Machines
There is a lot of excitement around Industry 4.0. For those of you thinking we’re just making up buzz terms (you may not be wrong), Industry 4.0 is viewed as the next revolution in manufacturing beyond automation. It’s where IoT, big data analysis, cloud connectivity, and cyber-physical systems – or, as I like to call…
Biobotics: The Automation of Life
This article was written in 2014 for MISC magazine, but not that much has changed yet. When most people hear the term “robot,” they picture a mass of lumbering metal powered by batteries, motors, electrical wires, and circuit boards. However, recent advancements have forced me to rethink my own definition of a field I’ve been…
Parlor Games and Asian Rooms: The AI Debate
Today I want to write a bit about the two sides of the artificial intelligence debate. The bulk of this piece – save some fun thoughts at the end – is going to be nothing new to those in the know, but there’s a lot of important prerequisite here that, since most of you aren’t…
Sexbots and Terminators: Exploring Gender in AI
Article written with Victoria Scrubb and originally appeared in MISC magazine. We’re playing God again. Every day it seems that videos, articles, or images emerge of humanity’s latest triumph in the robotics world and, with each subsequent release, we inch closer and closer to looking at ourselves through a digital mirror. Our ability to push…
Robicide: The Inevitability of Robots Killing People
In the past month, three individuals have been killed by robots in drastically different circumstances. While the loss of human life is always tragic, I don’t decry these moments with fear mongering about the dangers of robotics, or the folly of man’s experiments with playing God. I look at all of these situations as news…
Artificial Desire: Love & Lust in Robotics
I wrote this article about a year ago for MISC Magazine and really want more people to read it… just don’t tell my mom about it. A cursory search of the mighty internet will reveal that I am far from the first person to write about this topic. In fact, in addition to countless books,…
Electronic Persons: The Humanization of Robots
Article originally appeared on ideacouture.com While everyone’s eyes were on the Brexit vote and staggering economic implications this week, my mind was drifting to another crucial development within the EU. A draft European Parliament motion was recently put forward to begin to classify robots as “electronic persons.” In a response to the proliferation of robotics…
Creating Smart Assholes
Just because you made a machine “smart” doesn’t mean you made it intelligent. Smart homes, IoT, AI, ubicomp, robotics, ambient media, pervasive computing – all are words that in one form or another describe our attempt to embed digital intelligence into the otherwise dumb, lifeless devices around us. However, as we engineers so often do,…
Artificial Speculation
Introduction Scanning is a tool used in the foresight practice to uncover weak signals that herald shifts within different industries, behavioural changes, and other emerging movements that will shape the future. While this tool nets fruitful inspiration for organizations around the world, typically these exercises are limited to a few years out and within fairly…
Paging Doctor R2
Co-Authored by Paul Hartley It is undeniable that technology-enabled devices have had a great impact upon our ability to diagnose, treat and care for the sick and infirm. However, we must be cautious to not get caught up in the flashing lights, bells, whistles and web-integrated gadgetry of it all. Many people have a dangerous penchant…
Robots Control Your Mind
It’s a classic theme used in fiction: sci-fi writers and filmmakers create a dystopian future where robots use twisted logic around Asimov’s seminal 3 laws to decide that humanity can’t protect itself and therefore, must be imprisoned and controlled (I’ll admit, a bit of a stretch). Humanity, in its ever-present struggle for laziness and infinite-sigma…