After several months heads-down on several projects (more news about that soon), I decided to go back and see what I had missed by skipping Ubicomp 2007. So far, the most interesting paper, from my perspective is Sung, Guo, Grinter and Christiansen's My Roomba is Rambo (1MB PDF). It is a small empirical study that validates that people's relationships to their Roombas is often anthropomorphic and positive (in fact, it's almost a love letter to the brand, though I don't think the researchers were biased). I'm not surprised, since Roombas are one of the most prevalent forms of artificial life around and their unpredictable, unexpected behavior triggers is pretty "animal-like" to many people. This unpredictable, animal-like nature is what probably drove at least one Roomba competitor to show how their robot cleaner makes nice overlapping, distinctly mechanical sweeps when cleaning. Despite the fact that people have been naming their technology for thousands of years (ships, for example), there's still a tension between the rational response (of course it's a machine!) and the emotional one (...but it kinda acts like an animal) and it's good to see folks exploring and examining that tension. Their conclusions are in line with other work...
Thu, December 6, 2007 - 5:00 PM
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