Here's my recap of interesting things from the second day of Interaction 16.
Kate Darling (@grok_) talked to us about the ethics of robotic interactions. She showed a lot of great examples about how humans are tricked into feeling empathy for robots because of their anthropomorphism. She showed us a good example of a recent case where Boston Dynamics demoed the stability of their robot 'Spot' by kicking it (video below, watch the first 30 sec.). People were very upset about this and PETA even got involved.
Pablo Honey (not his real name apparently?) (@pablohoneyhoney) Talked about connected cities. He used Calvino's Invisible Cities as a lens to talk about the emotional, visceral interactions we could have with our surroundings. His talk brought up a lot of questions about who should be designing smart cities. We will have different outcomes if designers vs. engineers vs. government vs. hackers build them.
Jonathan Foster (@jonathanbfoster) manages the Cortana team at Microsoft. He talked about how they give Cortana a personality. They've discovered that people prefer for her to have opinions, for instance, if you ask her what her favorite movie is, she will give a real answer (it's one of the Star Trek movies).
Simone Rebaudengo (@fishandchipsing) and Nicolas Nova (@nicolasnova) showed us a bunch of stuff about Design Fiction. They design objects that can't be mass produced yet but are one-offs that allow them think about how things might work in the near future. They are asking big questions about the politics and social dynamics of the Internet of Things. A perfect example is the Ethical Fan which has a complicated algorithm (set by humans) to decide which person in the room should be cooled first, second, etc. They also showed a series of power strips that dole out electricity via political models (dictatorships, democracies, etc).
That's the end of day two. More tomorrow on the third and final day!
