2020 – now
Prof. Andreas Muxel
Elias Naphausen
Andreas Kraus
Fabian Pitzer
In our coexistence with robots we ascribe almost human qualities, emotions and liveliness to our technical counterpart. How might these things be designed if they evolve from passive tools to proactive and even social things? How can we shape their "thingness" beyond naïve human imitation to overcome an anthropomorphic design approach? And how does the process of designing the body and movement of a machine change our relationship to it?
ROBODADA is an open-source tool kit and can be used in different workshop formats. A web-based interface allows you to move a two-axis robot, record different movement patterns, and assign them to face expressions. Activating your webcam, ROBODADA tries to interpret your emotion based on a pre-trained model and activates the robot's recorded movement.
In different workshop formats participants can build small robots based on the ROBODADA tool kit using simple materials and tools such as cardboard, fabric, straws, sticks, rubber bands, a cutter and adhesive tape. Through experimental and playful approaches, the process of designing these robots will allow the participants to speculate on future robotic things and our relationship to them.
Muxel, A., & Naphausen, E. (2020). ROBODADA: speed-dating with (un)friendly robots. In Proceedings of the First Conference on Design with Artificial Intelligence (pp. 112-127). Berlin, Germany.