Track and Trace

Sabrina Verhage wants to get people out of cyberspace into the real world - especially in public spaces likes squares and parks where we are supposed to meet each other. So she decided to come up with an intervention: a curious, yet somewhat shy little drawing robot that would roam a square, looking for people to meet, and if possible try to connect people to each other. The bot's traces would serve as a physical, poetic and fading memory of where it had been, whom it had met and when.

Qualitative observation showed that people reacted very differently: young children would play with the bot, and sometimes pester and tease it a bit. They would scare it from the front but ambush it from the back, the same way how they would play in the schoolyard with the newest kid on the block. Senior citizens would stop by for a chat, sometimes spending considerable time talking to the bot. And as she had hoped, automated video analysis had proven people were spending more time on the square if the bot was there.

So will bots drive social network formation in the physical world and public space of the future?