Fire-Safety Robot Interaction Design

At CuriousU I met a lot of people from different countries and backgrounds. The course was very practical. We were free to write our own problem statement and design the solution as a story, built from the moments where a person meets the robot and what it does in response. As a team of five we voted, and chose to work on a fire-safety robot.

I worked on the physical prototype and on the harder question behind it, which was how the robot should behave around people in no state to read instructions. What it shows, how it moves, and how it makes its intent obvious in the couple of seconds someone will actually give it.

It was my first proper encounter with human-robot interaction, and with the idea that a robot which is technically correct but unreadable to a panicking person has simply failed. That perspective has stuck with me on everything I have built since.