Jina Lee – Looking Outwards 11

Mimus is an industrial robot coded to explore and respond to her surrounding environment from data collected through sensors. Typically industrial robots follow instructive movements, but she is different. She is in a glass room, so that she can interact with people walking around her by approaching them and moving along with their movements. Madeline Gannon is the designer. Gannon created Mimus to help people that fear that robots are taking work away from humans. She believes in “a more optimistic future, where robots do not replace our humanity, but instead amplify and expand it.” In her works, robots are treated as living creatures with emotions rather than objects, and she works towards a relationship of empathy and companionship between man and machine.

For you to better understand what Mimus is, here is a video.

Gannon graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Ph.D. in Computational Design. After graduating, she has been developing projects with natural gesture interfaces and digital fabrication. Her work intends to blur the line between man and machine and to break the stereotypical idea of dominance, and to prove that co-existence and collaboration can better amplify our human capabilities. I think it is really cool how she tries to bring together man and machine, because it seems like many people are trying to divide them as much as possible. In addition, as a design major who is interested in computational design, it is interesting to see what she does.