Insatiable Impatience

Life is full of waiting. Waiting for the water to boil, the bus to arrive, for a lecture to be over... However, unlike most machines, we are not really good at waiting. This work studies the quality of impatience in ourselves and in others. What is it that makes impatience different from nervousness or restlessness?

Insatiably Impatient (“Igor” for friends) is a simple robot with the body of a wind-up alarm clock and a ticking pen as an arm. It combines the rhythmic ticking of the clock, which reminds us of the passing of time, with the unpredictable semi-rhythmic ticking of a pen on the floor it’s standing on. This behaviour, also known as fidgeting, makes Igor into an impatient creature.

The lack of predictability is a key aspect of impatience. Creatures like the automaton shown below, acting out predictable fidgeting, become fundementally patient. Only through a certain amount of unpredictability the feeling of impatience can be transmitted. On the other end, tests performed during the creation process, showed that more abstract forms of impatient behaviour were often seen as plain nervousness. The simple sound of a clicking pen is enough to make people nervous, but it takes a physical source of the sound and a clock to actually convey the idea that Igor was waiting for something.

Once Igor had reached its final form, it immediately took on personality based on its surroundings. Put down at a bus stop, Igor became a traveler. Sat down at a dinner table, Igor became hungry. Standing next to the doomsdayclock, Igor became an evil robot. Sitting in a lecture room, Igor turned into an Continue reading...