Comments on: Big City, Small Robot

By: Reality in Game Design | Indie Game Design by Joseph Miller

Reality in Game Design | Indie Game Design by Joseph Miller — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:25:57 +0000

[…] Tweenbot experiment by Kacie Kinzer, for example, could be construed as a game that included a great deal of the real […]

By: Barbie

Barbie — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 00:06:09 +0000

In reply to Just another carbon unit. Never would have thunk I would find this so inispdenasble.

By: Just another carbon unit

Just another carbon unit — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:16:44 +0000

This video brought tears to my eyes. It is good to see SOCIAL sciences folks doing research that plumbs the ways humans are altruistic, caring, helpful, warm, cooperative, and gentle…in the middle of a concrete jungle. It was touching to watch the tender and attentive body language of the people who helped the Tweenbot. It would be very interesting to replicate this study in various big cities, and compare the results.

When I was in my Ph.D. studies in social sciences in the 1980s, it was all about exploiting people at the mass/demographic level, or manipulating their “hard wiring” to have certain attitudes, buy certain things, vote a certain way, and that was subsumed by the larger goal of careerism. The only other option was to follow the lead of Boomer faculty who were Stickin’ It To The Man by rebelling against…whatever it was they were rebelling against. The larger sense of research as a contemplative discipline by which we might understand ourselves better, and more honestly, simply wasn’t there that I could tell.

It was, I think, the dark ages. I finished my education, fled my field, and spent my life and skills trying to help Tweenbots (so to speak) at small local levels.

In the video, nobody did what I would have done: looked around to see if anyone was looking, picked up the Tweenbot, and carried it to its destination. Yes, that would have deprived it of its journey…but I would have first have asked it for sea stories, over coffee. I’m one of the people who can’t look at Mars in the night sky without getting all choked up about the Rover. 🙂

By: georgekhasin

georgekhasin — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 07:14:51 +0000

Very interesting. There are many studies that show that when people stand before something vague, abstract and full of gaps, they tend to fill these gaps in the most optimistic way. For example, there is a research by Dan that shows that online dating users who know little about other users would be more interested in them because they fill all the information gaps in their own image . The same principle is here- since the robot’s cartoonish face is really full of gaps (compared with a human/animal face), people tend to “fill in” the gaps of the robots face in the most optimistic way, or in their image. This is why they like the robot so much.

By: Big City, Small Robot | On education | Scoop.it

Big City, Small Robot | On education | Scoop.it — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:11:07 +0000

[…] Big City, Small Robot Several years ago, I began to make human-dependent cardboard robots and place them on the streets of New York City. These little robots, which came to be known as Tweenbots (a combination of the wo… Source: advanced-hindsight.com […]