IdleBot: Exploring the Design of Serendipitous Artifacts

We are increasingly surrounded by interactive, connected and engaging "things" that demand attention and convey a sense of continuous pace into our personal spaces. In this work, we explore how things could be designed from this opposite perspective: seemingly aware, but non-engaging. IdleBot is a very furry robotic puppet that is waiting. Unlike many applications in social robotics, IdleBot has neither clear purpose, nor explicit functionality--it merely exists and waits. The subtleness of its interaction, consisting of mostly idle motion, is the starting point to investigate forms of interaction bordering non-interaction situated in a personal context. Using data about human waiting behavior from an observational study, we designed a fully working prototype in two design iterations that embodies different modes of waiting and evaluated this design for its effect and acceptance of idle motions in context.

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