| Abstract | From Dautenhahn (2002) Design Space of Robots Paper "As comics designers have known for decades, the particular representation used to portray characters in a comic can influence dramatically the way people identify and sympathise with its characters. We are more likely to identify with Lucy or Charlie Brown than with Marilyn Monroe. Many people, children and adults, can identify with the former, they represent iconic ‘universal’ characters. A Marilyn Monroe representation stands for Marilyn Monroe, a unique individual with a particular biography and personality. We might be interested in her life stories and events that happened to her. And we might feel that she could stand for a whole generation of blonde female actors, but the scope for identifying with her is very different from the kind of ‘universal’ identification that is possible with simpler, less concrete, more generic characters such as Lucy or Charlie Brown which we can project a variety of subjective experiences onto. Fig. 2. The design space of comics, inspired by [16]. Figure 2 shows Scott McCloud’s design space of comics. In addition to the ‘realistic’ versus ‘iconic’ dimension (horizontal) he identifies a third dimension (vertical) along which representations become less and less concrete, where the representation itself becomes the focus of attention. What lessons can designers of believable robots learn from this? Firstly, simple designs might be better than realistic anthropo- or zoomorphic designs that try imitating life. Secondly, a ‘new’ design that is not imitating any naturally existing agent might better suit its role in a robotics context so that the robot’s behaviour and its function- alities predominantly determine the user’s attitude towards the machine, and only to a much lesser extent any preconceptions, expectations or anthropomorphic projections that can bias the user’s attitude even before any interactions have occurred. " |
