‘Signs of life’

Friendliness or Politeness is a human trait. A simple machine will not be viewed as friendly, it will simply be seen as ‘easy to use’. For example: A user presses play on his DVD player. Since the dvd-tray does not contain a DVD to play, it opens. When this happens the user might think ‘that’s a neat feature, the designers really thought about this‘. The device is not viewed as friendly, the reasoning for this is external. However when the device malfunctions, something happens in the users’ brain. When anger arises, everything is attributed to the machine.

In my project I want the machine to be able to elicit an emotional response instead of a rational one. To be able to do this it needs to show what I call ‘signs of life’. Below you can read how I define the 4 main principles.

1. Reciprocal perception
The first and most important sign of life is that of reciprocal perception. When a user is close to the device, the device must react to the user. In this reaction it should show the user it is aware of him, and is ready for him to interact. In human to human this translates from greeting a person, to simply changing body posture.
2. Pre-interaction
The device must be able to respond to ‘human’ input. Instead of waiting for the user to push a button it can react to voice or pointing, showing that it understands what the user means. Because this interaction takes place before the actual intention to interact, it shows a cognition from the device about the users state.
3. Non-linear motions
Machines for the most part move uniformly, in nature however nothing does the same. The reasons for this are mainly in physics: mass takes time to accelerate, and heavy accelerations are stressful on the structure of the moving body. To create a more natural motion in a product, these factors have to be taken into account, to create a more fluent motion.
4. Randomness
For people it is near impossible to do something twice in exactly the same way, so why should a device do that? By adding some randomness to the machines actions, it will seem more lifelike.

This list is probably not yet complete or fully correct, feel free to comment.