Despite the sustained financial & social difficulties in our daily lives, it is encouraging to come by such proof that clearly demonstrates continued collective human empathy. When the selfless acts of individuals & collective human curiosity can lead to simple yet significant goals, this author finds much solace and reassurance in the underlying kind nature of humanity.
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 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.
The tweenbots experiment performed by Tisch School of the Arts student Kacie Kinzer, used simple robots to test, first how we would interact with objects in our world that stand out, whether these individual interactions can build a larger context of achieving a goal. She builds 10 inch tall simple robots from cardboard with a flag noting its intended destination. The robot is then set on a motion the catch is, it travels at a constant speed, can only go forwards and cannot avoid obstacles by its own. It has to rely on the selfless help from strangers to read the its intended destination and move it out of its roadblocks and point it in the right direction. Despite Kacie's initial doubts of success, again and again, these Tweentbots successfully completed their mission due to the direct intervention of strangers helping a vulnerable robot in a vast crowded cityscape like New York. The report states, "...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." There are instances when the individuals would even point the robot in a safer direction if the intended direction was clearly dangerous to itself - like oncoming traffic. The individuals who help the robot are not thanked in any way, they seem to get satisfaction by simply seeing the robot continue on its way. Time and time again, unknowing strangers step aside from their hurried lifestyle to help in this achievement of a simple goal while building onto a larger complex collective narrative.
See videos and more the result of this ongoing experiment at the official site:
Tweenbots
