Cardboard, paper, ink, batteries, motor,
and wheels
36 x 8 1/2 x 14" (91.4 x
21.6 x 35.6 cm)
Tweenbots are small, constantly moving
robots that depend on the kindness
of strangers to get where they are going.
Interaction designer Kacie Kinzer sent
Sam, the best traveled of the Tweenbots,
on many missions in New York City’s
Washington Square Park, armed only with
a flag that asked passersby to point him
toward a particular destination. She fully
expected that Sam—made of a battery-operated
motor and cardboard—would
be crushed, lost, or thrown away, but
surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, depending
on how helpful you believe New Yorkers
to be) he always arrived safely at his
destination. “Every time the robot got
caught under a park bench, ground
futilely against a curb, or became trapped
in a pothole,” Kinzer observed, “some
passerby would always rescue it and
send it toward its goal.” Her secret
surveillance (via a video camera hidden
in her purse) showed that people would
interact directly with the robot and
were also willing to engage other
strangers in a discussion of its predicament.
If the Tweenbot’s destination
seemed too dangerous, people sometimes
ignored the instructions on the flag:
“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.’” The Tweenbots demonstrate
that a clever situation staged by a
designer can set a dialogue in motion
between people and objects.