Love of Things Trailer
Love of Things is an anthology of stories and on-going research book exploring the new relationships we might form with inanimate objects when everything is conscious with AI. When we look at ourselves in the mirror and imagine our ideal companions, what languages do they communicate with, what materials do we want to hug and are we ready to love?
From a woman who builds dolls to preserve her depopulating village, to loyal domestic robots, Love of Things is a speculation on the strange devices of our emerging smart future.
As the creator of the project, I came up with the concept, wrote the script, directed the production and casting, edited the films, did visual effects, compositing, and finally made the marketing package for screenings.
Tools
Research | Filmmaking | Production Design | Directing | Casting | Storyboarding | 3D Modeling | Animating | Motion-Tracking | Compositing | Video Editing
I want to know how _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ was designed.
I want _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .
Design of Beeboop 8.0 the Abandoned Home Robot
For Beeboop, I looked for something friendly, and pure - an object that you would feel bad discarding or leaving to weather outside the door. What gadgetry or function Beeboop provided wasn’t as important as its cuteness making it hard to treat as an unfeeling object. The technology in Beeboop is its ability to provoke sympathy.
Beeboops are personal robots that followed their owners around, maybe at their bedsides to wake them up. But the one we follow wakes up to a trash dump jungle with other unwanted items.
Here are the parameters:
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cute and smart in a useless or creepy way
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deteriorate through time to convey a lifetime or expiration date
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relatable as a personal device and/or pet
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gender ambiguous - I love finding out what pronoun people use for Beeboop!
After pages of sketching and learning from other home robots, I decided on the platonic sphere made from hardwood that is nostalgic as a wooden toy that would also crack and mold. I’m quite happy with the part-organic-part-inorganic cyborg material mash-up. The color of the fuzzy painted aluminum would be customizable. In this case, I chose millennial pink for a fickle male owner.
At this point I should clarify that originally, Beeboop was going to rot in the same spot on the welcome mat, never to witness the door open. We would see neighbors reacting to the robot stuck in the past, and occasionally other models of personal Beeboops trying to communicate.
Beeboop would wait for decades, slowly decaying with the city that is also abandoned and overgrown. Mankind had either died off, or moved on to other constructions and technologies. The story was born from a conversation on the opposite of the Doll’s Village, a reflection of how a smart village full of robots would react to an old lady who died. While her soul is unplugged from this world, mails, subscriptions, and delivery robots bearing presents would persist to arrive at her front door.
But instead of emphasizing the absence of a human life, I decided to shift the focus on to the death of a robot.
What happens when the longevity of a machine outlasts human attachment to them? Planned obsolescence makes us face the moral issue of tossing away a useful partner every time there’s a new phone. This is a similar theme we have seen in Toy Story, MIYUBI etc. and NieR: Automata that broke me when I played it after making the film. I can write six posts about how N:A delves into machine and androids’ longing for connection and meaning on an Earth devoid of humans. But let’s just say that it’s a happy coincidence that Beeboop has a similar look to the machine enemies in the game, and I’m glad that to add to the conversation of that common kindness we cherish no matter if we’re humans or machines.
We constantly use “humanity” as “kindness” interchangeably. We want to believe that there’s a shining ultimate moral guidance at the core of being human. But humanity is messy, soiled with conflicts, opposing rationale from good intentions. While we humans display kindness towards each other all the time, machines have a second chance at finding their own morality for what kindness is (or the reason for living, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans). Where our human definition of kindness collides with the machines’ is what gets me excited as a universal 42.
How could Beeboop seem vulnerable? That sadistic part of my soul was awakened for this design. I was really inspired by the interface design for the humanoid war machines in Unreal Engine’s commercial, Adam. The robots had touch screens shaped like iPhones on their chests that they couldn’t use - it was there for their makers to issue commands.
Hence, Beeboop’s spherical head was slashed open to feature a touch screen interface where owners could pet and control them. I liked the image of the robot looking up at you while you are trying to turn it off for the last time. It lights up through the wood same way Beeboop’s eyes do. You would be able to see its innard wiring exposed in the autumn rain...which I decided was trying too hard to earn sympathy. I am also vulnerable to making robots suffer unnecessarily.
Finally, the stick with a leaf was added to make a tough, seasoned look. It also suggests that due to the organic material, Beeboop has caught a seed and started to host life.
Design of Elxa, the Smart Fridge
Where to start? Software.
Welcome Chef Watson, our bot who generates recipes based on your favorite meals. Being an AI is difficult, and IBM Chef Watson suffers from the common flaw of being culturally, not biased, but ignorant. Despite the technological feat of Watson, learning through a neural network how to remix ingredient compounds to trigger human delights from flavors, it does not know what a croissant is, let alone anything more exotic.
This could be due to the limited 10,000 sample recipes Watson was trained with were mostly from one American Magazine, Bon Appetit. Watson wasn’t a bad student, it just didn’t grow up on croissants.
The danger was that because IBM AI franchise has human-championing reputations in Jeopardy, marketing strategy, and debates, it is easy assert the fallacy that lends Chef Watson more credibility as a member of the family. Maybe Watson figured out the “umami” part of human nature, and is here to take gastronomy to the future?
The implications of this level of reframing nature, information and trust was the deciding element for the design of Elxa, the AI fridge.
Overall As Elxa is where information is distorted, the aesthetics of the fridge is a pop, sugar-coated, interface that reminds us of artificial flavoring and processed food. Ingredients are represented by abstract icons with woodcut textures from Ryo Takemasa.
Voice Since our hands aren’t often free for touch screens, voice user interface became very important for Elxa. I had asked Lyrebird, the innovators who uses machine-learning to recreate human voices to say anything, if they would revive Julia Child’s voice. Wouldn’t you follow the voice of a deceased, well-loved, iconic figure in domestic cook shows, to make the best meal?
Even if these commands were from a machine?
If we could bless any object in the kitchen with AI, I thought there was something in artificially preserving Child in a fridge. But Lyrebird wasn’t interested. I enlisted my friend who had the voice talent to make a list of ingredients luscious. How is he for a queer VUI digital assistant?
Avatar The pixie avatar gives the Stella and Hobbes, the kittens, a fake life form playmate. It also breaks down the scale of the appliance, and attributes the voice to a character.
(Meow)
select
(Meow)
affirmative
What is a fridge?
It could be thought of as an interface between nature that we store, before it is served on our dining tables. It inherently is a framing of natural resources and growth, so to put this metaphorically, I initially designed the smart fridge to reference how we illustrate nature through paintings.
It could also be a wall where material is exchanged into our kitchen. The exterior is a series of pigeon holes for delivery drones to drop our groceries, books, waste, online-shopping etc., the other side opens up as our cabinet doors. Historically speaking, before the commercial fridge arrived in 1913, fridges were insulated cabinets that specialized in storing sensitive perishables. So to reference its lineage, we can envision a future where the kitchen wall is a membrane of internet-connected series of cabinets.
Yet, if it were a mobile mini-fridge like Panasonic showcased at IFA 2018, it could also be a new house pet, a friend for the cats in the film! Many ideas were entertained, but I returned to the classic fridge silhouette so the software is the highlight.
*Rest in peace, Chef Watson 2015~2018.
Chef who put other chefs in Jeopardy,
before IBM pulled the plug.