Post Forum Report

Documentation: Post Forum Report | Live Reporting | Gallery | Video Vault| Break Out Group Reports

Report: The Robots and Avatars Forum, NESTA, 25/11/09

By: Steve Boxer | Photos: Vipul Sangoi

The Robots and Avatars Forum at NESTA was convened with a deceptively simple aim: to explore the issues that will arise when robots and avatars become part of our daily working lives. Boundaries between the real, the virtual and the robotic are becoming more blurred by the day, but when we begin to interact with the virtual and the robotic on a daily basis, how will that impact working practices, what identity issues will it raise – and, indeed, how will the concept of working life as we know it change? One specific angle for discussion concerned the current generation of pre-teens, who will be pitched straight into such a working environment, which is likely to be unrecognisable from that of today. To that end, the day contained cutting-edge addresses, demos and workshops mixed with lively debates and break-out groups, with the aim of identifying the key questions and concepts surrounding robots and avatars. Participants ranged from 13 to mature and for a wide range of backgrounds, specialisations and sectors.

And we’re off

The day kicked off with an introduction by Ghislaine Boddington, Creative Director of body>data>space. Boddington almost immediately highlighted one of the day’s key themes: “Now we can make our own avatars, that opens up a debate on identities and communities.” The question of the effect of avatars on identity, in particular, was to recur throughout the forum.
Boddington spelt out some key questions for discussion: “How will today’s eight-year-olds play and work in 20 years’ time? What will their working days be like?” Touching on telepresence and telematics – remote interaction – she pointed out that what were once esoteric concepts are now more or less commonplace thanks to things like Skype. And she asserted: “There is a shift away from the “I”-based thinking I was brought up with to multi-identity thinking, which is a big shift.” And she signed off with an old Mayan saying, used as a greeting: “I am another yourself.”

back to the top

The morning session

Next up was Pear Urushima from Apple, who delivered a talk about imagining working life ten to 15 years from now. After touching on some interesting robotic and telepresence projects taking place in the US, she cut to the chase. According to Urushima, working life in 2020 will involve: “Collaborating with intelligent avatars,” “Tribalising enterprise avatars,” (the idea of using avatars yet maintaining a unified corporate front is intriguing), “Speaking the language of business avatars,” and “Avatars as independent contractors.” She supplemented this with a discussion of the skills that would be required in such an environment, of which the issues of credibility and virtual identity creation stood out. She signed off by saying that she would like: “An avatar personal assistant and a robot to clean my desk.”
The ensuing Q&A session centred on two points: the credibility and trustworthiness of avatars – in a business environment, how could we be sure that avatars were what they purported to be? – and the very nature of avatars – nowadays, avatars are merely visual representations with humans behind them, but Urushima seemed to suggest that in the future, some will be fully automated, suggesting that new nomenclature may have to be developed. The potential equalising effect of avatars – putting large and small corporations and even individuals on an equal footing – also became a discussion point.

back to the top

Show and tell

The next segment of the Robots and Avatars Forum was a quick-fire show-and-tell in which a diverse panel of people working on virtual-physical projects took turns to show some of those projects to the audience.
The first speaker was Rick Hall, from Ignite and Rehearsal.org. Hall also took a peek ten to 15 years into the future, saying: “In this rapidly changing world, people will be doing jobs that haven’t been invented yet, and most jobs will be changing themselves when workers reach the age of 30 to 40. Today’s children will be inventing most of those jobs themselves. How can we encourage and support those characteristics of thinking in this changing world?”
Hall created a stir by reporting that he had consulted his young niece, who had come up with some buzz-phrases: “Facebook develops quick-wittedness,” “Jump-circumstances,” meaning that if you see something, you respond to it and “Snappy confidence”. All attributes, he explained, that young people gained from social networking. He finished by drawing a parallel between young people engaging using avatars and through characters in Theatre In Education, seeding the idea, which would persist throughout the day, of robots and avatars being analogous to theatre.

back to the top

A robot in Parliament

Charlotte Moore, from Sidekick Studios,was next up, and she started off with a neat virtual-physical tie-up, in which you can email messages to Sidekick, and a typewriter will write them out , while you watch on a webcam. And the Voicebot, a writing-robot which you can send messages to, which briefly took up residence in the Houses Of Parliament, creating a stir among MPs.
Next came Emmanuel Cuisinier and Celine Naninni from the Centre des Arts in Paris. Who touched on a variety of projects supported by their digital arts centre, including Tantaka Takahashi and Emmanuel Grimaud’s To Infinity And Beyond, which fused robot design and anthropology, featuring stylised Japanese robots and realistic Indian automata making symbolic gestures; Stelarc’s Body Mechanics; and a number of workshops with children making robots from household objects and interacting with giant sheets of paper.
Finally, it was the turn of Derek Richards from Hi8us. He concentrated on the L8R series of 10-minute dramas, written and acted by the young people with which Hi8us mainly works. Richards spoke fascinatingly about how people tuning into the dramas can further engage with the characters by logging onto the show’s website, where writers (and in one case the actual cast-member) act as the characters in the show and answer questions from the public. Richards posed the question: “Are you your real self online?” which was to recur throughout the rest of the day. He also asserted: “You have to have a model and understanding of identity which is sophisticated enough to interact with robots and avatars.” And: “Avatars enable us to be true in different ways and also to lie in different ways. We need to be a bit more complex and subtle about how we model identity on and offline.”

back to the top

Korea calling

After a break for lunch, during which three practical workshops took place, the Forum reconvened for a live Skype hook-up with South Korea. As a preliminary, Sarah Platt from Kinura spoke about the webcasting work her company performs, generating much interest by revealing that the National Theatre has been broadcasting some plays live to cinemas, and that its production of Phedre was seen by a staggering 50,000 people in that way. She also contributed to the debate about the job of the future, contending that the “Slash-slash generation, where people describe themselves as a designer-slash-programmer and so on,” was already on the rise.
The Skype link-up to South Korea revealed Dooeun Choi, Creative Direct of Art Center Nabi – or rather, it didn’t exactly reveal her, as Choi performed the link-up wearing a giant cartoon-style rabbit-head, as a sort of physical, rather than virtual, avatar.
Choi rattled through a large number of projects she was involved in curating, via video-clips launched locally. She began with one showing the huge A.L.I.C.E Museum project (http://www.nabi.or.kr/project/current_read.nab?idx=210), in which a girl and a human in a rabbit-suit (hence Choi’s headgear) played with a range of virtual-physical installations. Choi explained that the video was designed to engage young people.
Choi showed an array of projects, including one in which four children used their hands in shadow-play to form an avatar, and another in which a Snow White-like chess-piece, when moved around a diorama, launched different shadow-projected stories.
She then participated in a discussion that mainly concentrated on cultural differences, explaining how people in countries like Korea and Japan are more receptive to robots and avatars than the West. “But the character of avatars in Korea and Japan is very different – in Japan, they tend to look like ghosts, whereas in Korea, they are more realistically human, or else cute.” She also spoke about how Far Eastern culture is more comfortable with crediting inanimate objects with some form of life: “A lot of scientists and artists here think robots are not machines, but that they have their own soul, since they have a past, present and future.”

back to the top

Food for thought

Armed with this vast array of robots and avatars-related information, and the huge number of discussion-points it raised, the Forum split up into groups to ponder the key questions which will underpin further Robots and Avatars Forums in the future, and ultimately lead to a better understanding of what the workplace of 2020 and beyond will be like. We will put those questions up on this site shortly, so you can get involved in the discussion around this fascinating and important topic.

back to the top