Kevin Grennan's robotic visions pose an intriguing question: What should a robot smell like? The London-based designer imagined three industrial robots with “sweat glands,” each emitting a different chemical catalyst designed to alter human behavior. There's a surgical bot that makes patients about to undergo surgery more trustful, an assembly line machine that aids in focusing the workers working around it, and even a bomb-disposal unit that smells of fear.Grennan’s project is part of the annual Design Interactions Show from the Royal College of Art in London, which exhibits these works as an exploration of the social impact of technological development, while at the same time expanding the scope of design and its applications for solving real-world issues. While the robots themselves are only concepts, Grennan has built separate functioning parts centering on scent as a means of communication and manipulation.The pink, fleshy attachments look out of place, even downright silly in these images of otherwise conventional industrial robots, but the technology has astounding, somewhat troubling, potential as a stimulus for enhancing human-robot behavior. In an interview with We Make Money Not Art, Grennan himself admitted that, "While from a functional perspective these ‘sweating’ robots might be able to perform their tasks and interact with humans more efficiently, I hope that the dark thought of robots taking subconscious control of humans will cause viewers to reflect on how we really want to interact with these machines in the future." This resonates with the overall purpose of the Design Interactions Show as a source of perspective for the future of design, which itself is geared towards "the complex, troubled people we are, rather than the easily satisfied consumers and users we are supposed to be."
All of this raises some serious questions about the implications of robot humanization. On one hand, making machines more relatable makes them more useful, but besides completing a given task, we must also think about how robots may affect us adversely. Just look at some of the latest Japanese androids if you have any doubts about how scary robot’s potential can be. The message here is not anti-robotics, but rather breaking out of the consumer mentality that governs the way we view, and ravenously pursue, technology and advancement. In the case of robotics, the disturbing caveat is that the more these machines resemble us and mimic our behavior, the more surreal and alien they appear (a concept in stark contrast to the work being down by social roboticist Heather Knight). And that off-putting nature speaks for itself as a sobering reminder that something about fabricating our humanoid counterparts seriously perturbs the fragile human psyche.
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