This first idea is for a “reading robot.” I imagine this piece being not incredibly interactive, more of a kinetic sculpture. There would be an articulated camera pointing at a camera going through a simple idle animation as though reading the book. There would be a mechanism to flip the pages of the book (or whatever it is reading). I see this piece as being an interesting artifact, and when someone comes to closely inspect what the robot is reading it could be an interesting opportunity to have the robot be reading an interesting or amusing article/book such as something along the lines of ‘how to start a robot uprising.’
Once again pardon my terrible sketches, but the idea here is to have a simple gantry that can move around and press the keys on a computer. The robot would be connected to a microphone and essentially just listen to what people were saying nearby and start typing them down into a text document. I think this would be interesting to see how people interact with it and how people respond to having their words written down when they are within ‘earshot’ of the robot.
This idea is somewhat inspired by both the ‘useless box’ and just the experience of trying to watch tv with a sibling when you want to watch a different channel. There would be a remote on a table to change the channel or the volume or whatever, but whenever someone changes something, the robot would respond with frustration or maybe just resigned irritation depending on how recently someone interacted with it or other factors. The robot would also be able to control the tv to change it back to whatever channel it ‘wants’ to watch.