Designing Unbodied Robots

Sandra Bermúdez
Chatbots Life
Published in
4 min readJun 8, 2016

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screenprism.com

A couple of years ago we saw Theodore falling in love with Samantha. Her, Spike Jonze’s movie, is a classical romantic comedy about a guy who falls in love with a female in a complicated situation. The twist lies in the girl who is an artificial intelligence program running an operating system.

This is not by far the first time that we find in popular culture narratives of a man getting involved with a machine. However, in Her we read the promise of a near future when not embodied robots will relate with us in a sentimental way.

Jonze’s inspired his screenplay on an article about an AI based instant messaging program. For longtime this kind of routines had been kept in labs and development environments but now they are up to be released to the popular consumption through frameworks and services like Slack’s Howdy or Pandorabots.

As long as giants like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and even Mattel announced this year bold efforts to lead this category of technology, it seems like chatbots based services to be the next disruptive wave in digital platforms.

Due to this emerging scene, in UX design we are facing the hype of conversational interfaces. A conversational interface is by definition “any UI that mimics chatting with a real human” in its own human terms, that means through natural language. As UX and UI designers now we must figure out how to shape this new kind of interactions.

Not all conversational interfaces are chatbots, but there’s no doubt that the promising future of them is hitting the tree. We find now richer input forms and deeper onboardings flows in all kind of web services and digital platforms. Also chatbots can express themselves through voice, typing or even faking a lipsing avatar.

Remarks of unbodied robots on design practices.

I. UI design moves beyond graphical elements

For longtime GUI has rule the way we relate with computers. In this regard graphic designers claimed the realm of the UI design. Now it’s time to think beyond visual delightful and embrace a wider view of UX as the driver of every decision made. By the end, it seems like artificial intelligence agents will become the tissue of the Internet in the upcoming years.

II. Designing with natural language processing

We are used to experience our relationship with machines either through the command line or the graphical interface. Both of these methods are constant reminders that the computer is just a machine in the attempt to complete a task. Neverthless, having a conversation with an entity who process natural language hides that dimension. Through an intelligent conversational interface is easier to develop empathy and even sentimental attachments, just ask Theodor and all the guys in movies and literature whom had fall in love with robots. Anyway, all this kind of feelings and connections are key performers of an effective design strategy so we should think how to take advantage of them.

III. Personas profile goes both sides

Maybe the most conventional task of an UX designer is the personas definition. We figure out how to relate with an archetypical user and then we build an environment to fit his needs and desires. With a conversational interface now we have a robot-to-person scheme to shape, that means we should define a persona for the unbodied robot as well as the one for the human user. In addition, we’ll need to make decisions on the nature of the connection they will evolve through.

English designers Dunne and Raby explores this kind of issues. In the serie “Technological dreams” they portrait four classes of robots; an independent, a nervous, a data sentinel and a needy one. The projects of D&R works around what is known as critical design, speculative proposals intended to make us reflect on the role products and technologies plays in our everyday life.

But current bots already have their own temper. Jabberwacky, for example, is a funny bot whom values the sense of humor, while Danielle is based in a Kurzweil novel character and of course we remember Tay, the racist teenager from Microsoft.

IV. Cross-platforms and multi-screen

An unbodied robot is by nature an abstract entity. In order to get in touch with a human it should be able to appropiate of any platform and screen at his disposal and also to shape itself. But don’t misunderstood, it’s not about responsiveness, but actually to allow it to jump from space to space and to deploy in the whole environment, even in the air of our home. From the public screen in Times Square to the intimacy of our virtual assistant at home, unbodied robots need guidance on how to communicate with us according to the context and that’s the new design challenge.

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