Hold your Horses
When browsing through the other wonderful blog posts, I found the exploration of Clumsy Creatures by Joyce den Hertog interesting in particular. In my previous blog post about lazy robots, I briefly talked about how dysfunctional household appliances can be interpreted as "lazy". As a reaction to these machines not working we encourage them or give them a figurative slap on the wrist. We treat them as living creatures, whose behaviour can be corrected. It is their dysfunctionality that gives them a lively and playful aspect.
I feel like the same can be said for the clumsy robots Joyce shared. The observed clumsiness makes us laugh and even feel pity for the robot. It gives the robot a kind of personality that we can better relate to. Instead of the highly functional and precise machines, they are usually designed to be, these examples offer us much more realistic and likeable robots. Creatures that as most of us, are simply trying to do their best.
For this post, I would like to think about a creature that contrasts the creature from my previous post. So instead of being lazy, it is very eager to please. In all its eagerness, however, it gets way too excited and just as the lazy creature eventually fails to do an adequate job. Again it should have a simple and clear objective.
What I envisioned is a square creature can that can roam around freely through the house. On the surface of the square, it has a perfect cup-sized hole. The creature only has one simple purpose and that is to make your life easier by holding your drink for you. So while watching a movie or chilling with friends, it goes up to you by itself and offers to take your drink. Once you allow it to hold your drink, it starts showing its excitement by shaking a bit. Slowly the shaking starts to intensify. The longer you allow it to hold the drink, the heavier it starts shaking with excitement. At one point it is shaking so hard that the drink starts spilling all over the place. However, it doesn't stop shaking. Only after you took the drink from it will stop shaking and calm down again.
As of now, I have two ways in which to interpret dysfunctional robots. On the one hand, you have lazy robots capable of doing all sorts of things, but don't feel the need to exhaust themselves. On the other hand, you have clumsy creatures that are really excited to accomplish a certain task, but in their excitement or absent-mindedness fail to do so.