Making your own comfort object
Making Friends By Making Them is an open source modular construction kit with the parts that you can easily source and make at home.
The goal for this project is to utilized improvisational play with Robotic Intimacy Technology (RIT) to cope with human isolation, to explore the awkward edges of human and robot interaction, and reflect our vulnerability. Robotic Intimacy Technology is a way of facilitating sense of intimacy through touch and body communication. The research raises questions regarding the quality of intimate sensations offered through technology.
With careful form, motion, user experience studies, I will create an open source DIY construction kit, Making Friends by Making Them (MFBMT), that allows the user to fabricate and customized their own object. By making the object DIY, it adds sense of ownership, allows for better personalization, improvisational play, putting our own fantasy to play and also reflect our own internal and external struggles with the
Cardboard Friend is part of the Making Friends by Making them series, where I provide all the 3D printing files and instructions for you to assemble and program you own friend.
The idea is to “make a friend” in a different way. How would you program a friendship? What kind of interaction would you program it to have? By answer those questions, we might just reveal more about ourselves.
