Hasta La Ideas

Radiolab Panel

With the title Talk to Me, the design exhibition currently on view at MoMA is naturally required to include some lectures, talks and curated conversations around and about the content. That content, which includes recent design work using and addressing technology to communicate, is fantastic, but also takes some time and focus to get through. The objects, videos and concepts on view are both about, and often require, the complexity and delight of communication and interaction. Simply, it’s not a show one can merely peruse (great stimulation = quick brain drain). Lucky for us, MoMA Senior Curator Paola Antonelli hosted a Symposium last week in which, appropriately, several designers, artists and activists talked about the works in the show, design and communication.

The event kicked off with a keynote conversation and presentation with Antonelli, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of Radiolab, writer Steven Johnson, and Eyewriter co-designer Zach Lieberman. In a loosely-guided discussion, they talked about designs, both in our everyday and the exhibition, which address the increasingly blurred line between human and machine. (One irresistable highlight being “Hi, a real human interface” by Multitouch Barcelona that we wrote about last week.)

The Radiolab guys talked about their uneasy attraction to “Julie,” the perky and friendly computerized voice of the Amtrak customer service system. (Watch this Saturday Night Live skit where Julie mingles at a party, and you’ll get it.) And of course, with it just released a week prior, Siri, Apple’s new assistant-on-demand living in the iPhone 4S quickly came up. They also discussed a few more blatantly attractive (by way of being cute) responsive robots: the talking stuffed animal Furby, and Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbot, which is in the exhibition.

Furby

Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbot

With a simple cardboard body, with big red wheels, two rectangle arms, and paunch belly, topped off with two big black eyes and a smile, the Tweenbot is an endlessly interesting design prop for studying human behavior. Its robotics are totally simple—it rolls. Forward. The key element is its flag, which implores anyone nearby to help it get to where its going. Everyone who sees it smiles, nudges it along, turns it around when it hits a wall. Onstage on Tuesday, Antonelli started it up, and it was saved from falling off the stage a few times.

Radiolab also played a clip from one of their episodes, in which computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum discusses his invention, ELIZA, a computer therapist. The therapist voice (again female) conducts a conversation with the user by merely repeating back what has been said in a different way or question form. (i.e. Person: “I feel sad today.” Computer: “Why do you feel sad?”) Weizenbaum found that his employees, even knowing that it was a program, couldn’t tear themselves away from talking to it.

With Siri, Julie and ELIZA in mind, Antonelli, Abumrad, Krulwich and Johnson discussed the fast-approaching line of questionable ethics that these robots-disguised-as-humans raise. Johnson pointed out that “one of the biggest fears of humans is mistaking the robot for humans.” Are people being deceived by these technologies and designs? Have we lost control to them? Hasn’t that always been the fear with new technologies?

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