The Kindness of Strangers

[liz_marcs]

This Web site makes me smile like a loon, although there's no good reason why it should.

Maybe because I love confirmation that people, as a species, are just plain weird.

Read about the Tweenbots and how the kindness of strangers can carry these inanimate objects through the big, bad New York City:

But of more interest to me was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people's willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining its 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.

There's video and and pictures at the the source

Comments

[huzzlewhat.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for posting this! I'm sitting at my desk, grinning like an idiot!

"You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

[piemancer]

Humans can be so adorable! Let's do that all the time.

[annie-bee.livejournal.com]

This is really, really cool. Thank you for sharing. It does kind of make me sad, though, that people are more willing to be kind to a 'robot' than they are, sometimes, to each other.

[szandara.livejournal.com]

That's so much fun, and the tweenbots are so cute. Nice to be reminded that humans can be decent.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Aww. That's so sweet. :-)

[booster17.livejournal.com]

Wonderfull. Just wonderfull.

[bellatemple]

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.

Something about this whole introduction to the concept has me grinning. I want more people to follow this example.

Also, an icon reading "To answer these questions, I built robots."

*goes to explore site more*

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Adorable. Have shared the joy.

[ponders-life.livejournal.com]

Cool! Thanks for posting this.