Category — Design

Keepon is a creature-like robot full of scientific purpose and research value.

The goals of “understanding humanity” and “humanizing robots” are tightly related to each other. Infanoid Project is trying to relate robotics to human sciences in order to understand the underlying mechanism of social communication specific to humans and some species of primates.

Early communication between a child and caregiver is mainly embodied through touch and eye-contact. By investigating the developmental mechanism of the embodied interaction, we are trying to study the core human communication capabilities and design principles for future info-communication systems with which we can make symbiotic relationships.

Currently, we are implementing the social development on these robots; also we are observing and analyzing how human children interact with these robots. We believe these two complementary activities will help us to model social communication and its development during the first years of life. In addition, we are transferring the research outcomes to our society by utilizing the robots in the remedy for children with developmental disorders and by organizing a series of international academic workshops “Epigenetic Robotics”.

Cool, yeah. But also? IT DANCES.

Yeah…it’s like that.

*Also, to the person who ended up here by googling ‘negative test 3 days late clearblue’ I say: stay strong, sister. And, clearblue sucks.

Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers project features photographic prints of the massive amounts of waste we produce every day. Go see them. Now.

Running the Numbers An American Self-Portrait

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

cj, January 2007