Kip is a personal evoking robot designed as an empathy object. The robot’s function is to increase people’s awareness to the effect of their behavior towards others, potentially leading to behavior change through physical gestures. Kip has several roles, he serves as a robotic conversation companion that listens to people’s conversation tone and reacts to them and helps in balancing multiple speakers’ conversation by gazing towards the speaker, to maintain civilized discussion.
Kip was designed with a few principles in mind: empathic, peripheral, and fragile. Our challenge was to create something that is highly expressive while still being an extremely simple robotic object. Our aim is for Kip to accompany the interaction without drawing too much attention. We don’t want to compromise the natural communication pattern in an interaction. Kip was also designed to reflect the effects of one’s behaviour through subtle physical gestures.These gestures are designed to evoke empathy. The idea is that people’s empathy towards the robot will cause them to have empathy towards each other too.
The Media Innovation Lab was fortunate enough to be invited to feature Kip, our empathy robot in this prestige exhibition- Hello, Robot.
