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Intervention 1:
Dispensing Machine
People Knowing, 2010
Instructors: Ben Hooker, Sean Donahue
In collaboration with
Dee Kim,
Brooklyn Brown
What happens when the vending machine comes to you? Like all vending machines, this mobile vending machine really just wants attention. Through our observation we find that people surprisingly treat it as though it is a machine, despite the obvious human presence inside it. The cultural expectation of a robotic looking costume, even one made of cardboard, is that it will act like a machine. The stark contrast between the outside view and the inside is rather interesting. From the inside, the "robot's" view is sad, lonely, and silent. No one makes eye contact with her, but they are feverishly looking at her and touching her button. On the outside, the machine is simply making people curious and happy to engage with it.
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The final iteration with the "robot" involves a person wearing a cardboard box robot consisting of two iPhones for eyes, a doorbell nose that says "Press Here," and an additional doorbell button at the top that says "Follow." There is spycam hidden at the top that served to document the reactions as well as allow Dee, who was the person inside, to see where she was walking.
Robot Behavior:
[LEFT]outside view [RIGHT]inside view
The robot approaches people and then stands near them waiting until they press her button. Once they press it, she dispenses a small coin envelope containing a single Skittle to them through her "mouth." If someone passes by while she is walking, she will stop and then slowly rotate to watch him walk by, hoping for his attention. She is confrontational, but very passive-aggressive since she just stands slightly too close to you and waits for you to engage her by pressing her button. She will twirl when she is being ignored for too long or when she receives a compliment or pat on the head. If someone presses the follow button, she will follow him for approximately 30 seconds and then stop.
Dispensing Machine Eye:
EARLIER ITERATIONS
This "robot" evolved from a set of experiments in which we dispensed individually packaged candy to Art Center students in small coin envelopes. The first intervention used a board with 5 labels for different emotions (happy, sad, etc), and envelopes pinned below as the implied prescription for each feeling. People were not engaging it with as much as we hoped, so one of us stood behind it as the pharmacist and we received more customers.
The earlier iteration involved a larger board, with more emotion choices and the candies lined up in rows. We removed ourselves from this one and simply watched from a distance as the envelopes were taken. Following this one, we missed the involvement of the human element as part of the dispensing machine and decided to add it back in.
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