I ran into this on the Huffington Post, and I think they had it right when they called it the most adorable social experiment ever:
From Kaycie:
In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.
Here's the description from YouTube:
Tweenbots are robots that navigate the city by the help of the people they meet. The project came about by an interest and an idea: the interest was in the way that we move through city space-- what do we think about, how do we create maps and meaning based on our impressions and encounters as we go from one place to another? And, the idea was that I could facilitate narrative related to this complexity by creating objects that traverse the space along with us.
Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and are at the mercy of pedestrians they encounter to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal. The journey the bots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people's willingness to engage with a strange-- and some would say potentially suspicious-- character.
As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it's destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.
Maybe I'm feeling a bit sentimental because I've been watching the most moving episode of "Extreme Home Makeover" ever, where there's a family, the Kadzis family, who adopts special needs children from China. The father of the family found out he has brain cancer, the tumor was successfully removed the first time, but it came back, and now he's in the hospital now blind and dying while Ty and the other workers built the house. They even got Stevie Wonder to come through and play because the family is such a huge lover of music. It's one thing to adopt a child, especially one from another country, but this couple adopted older (not babies) special needs children. One of them is deaf, and in China they didn't teach her sign language, so she had no way to communicate. Could you imagine going through life not being able to communicate with anyone? And the two youngest are just so in love with school and learning because they didn't have access to free education in China, that they wanted a school room design in their room. When Ty wanted them to go see the rest of the house, they wanted to stay and look at all of their new learning stuff. I mean this is a really powerful episode. The father's dying wish was that his family would have a safe house to live in. He died three days after the house was finished.
So I'm watching that and then I see this video on the Huffington Post, and it makes me wonder how many people would have been willing to help the robot had they seen it? I'm not sure if I would have helped it, it would have depended on my mood.
Anyway, I just wanted to share the video with you because it really is just too adorable for words, I'm actually surprised as many people helped the robot as did.
Oh, and for the people wondering about people calling the bomb squad, here's more from the website:
Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination. Because I built them with minimal technology, I had no way of tracking the Tweenbot’s progress, and so I set out on the first test with a video camera hidden in my purse. I placed the Tweenbot down on the sidewalk, and walked far enough away that I would not be observed as the Tweenbot––a smiling 10-inch tall cardboard missionary––bumped along towards his inevitable fate.
The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the "right" direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road."
LOL, that last little bit is a cute anecdote. Oh, and you should really go read her whole page, it's good (and short) reading. I think I may keep up with this site to see the other robot journeys.