Hello, My name is Dominique Deuff.
I am working at Orange, the historical French telecommunication company.
I am an ergonomist and am currently finishing a PhD in design and ergonomics with LS2N laboratory,
Strate School of design in collaboration with GVLab from Tokyo.
Me and my partners will introduce our work regarding Yōkobo, a sensible presence robject.
Orange is working on the theme of the connected home.
The vision explores the home as a place composed of various IoT and a vocal assistant.
And through these objects, the home could help, support, and offer services to the inhabitants
to improve their experience and well-being.
Our original question was: what type of value a robot can bring to the household?
And what could be the impact of such an object?
To work on this subject, we choose to focus on young retirees, which means persons that
have just retired.These people are full-time at home.
The transition to retirement is a period that can cause many upheavals.
These newly retired people may need to re-appropriate their space and time and reorganise their
domestic tasks.
It is a period where divorces are increasing.
So we wondered if a robot could be an object that could mediate the two individuals who
have just retired to improve their communication.
To understand the ecosystem of our users, we launched two studies in France and in Japan.
First, our goal was to understand the life of retirees in their homes.
This two-week study highlighted the emergence of a complex and ambivalent feeling for retired
couples: while expressing a relatedness need towards the partner, spouses also pointed
out a need for individual freedom.
This need for personal time can generate a gap between the two spouses because one of
them can need more time alone, causing a feeling of loneliness in the other.
Therefore, we observed a surprising insight which indicates that even when living with
a spouse, some retired spouses can experience a feeling of loneliness.
We carried out a second survey with the same participants to understand the perception
of so-called social robots in the context of the retirees’ households.
This second survey used the Softbank’s robot Pepper.
We wanted to collect the participants’ feelings about a large robot of this type placed in
the context of their home.
Pepper was placed for two days as a technical probe to gain users’ information and perceptions
regarding such an object.
The aim was not to determine the object’s usefulness in the household but to study how
the participants apprehend it with its behaviours and dynamics.
Results highlighted the notion of presence that such an object brings and the desire
to engage in interaction with such a robot.
In contrast, it was considered too big, cumbersome, and noisy.
Considering a robot is a possible link within the couple and considering a robot can generate
a presence’s feelings, our aim is not for this object to be a companion for the spouse
who feels alone but for it to convey the presence of the other.
We did not consider Pepper’s robot to answer this issue.
Consequently, we decided to seek another way of envisioning a robot.
Three types of robots inspired us: Weak robots.
They hesitate.
They make us do things.
Behavioural objects are objects with unpredictable and spontaneous behaviour that make us think
they have intentions.
Robjects are daily objects that have been robotised.
All these studies show that it is not the complexity of behaviour or appearance that
will make people use these objects but rather their ability to draw people’s attention.
What inspires us is that they are not objects that replace us.
They are objects that put us into action mainly based on their motions.
From this background, we started a design process to create an object that could explore
our research and design questions.
In the beginning, we had the two surveys that produced insights just described before.
Then we started an ideation phase to identify a service concept that matched our user target.
From this service concept, we conducted a design thinking process.
And we delivered a mock-up from which roboticists built a prototype following an agile approach.
The pictorial describes the work achieved, from identifying the service concept to prototyping
it.
During theses phases, the reflections sailed between the concept, the shape’s design,
and the interactions’ modalities.
The team shifted from a collective of designers to a multidisciplinary team, including engineers
and programmers.
The ideation phase led to Yōkobo, a robject placed at the home entrance which can fuse
effortlessly with the home.
Its focus is to greet little moments of life to strengthen the links between the couple.
We started to study objects in the entrance hall and modelled the entrance with papers,
seeking imaginaries and usage scenarios.
Many discussions focused on the pin-tray often laid on a sideboard.
The pin-tray can be used extensively and regularly and receive the personal keys of the couple.
We studied how to rethink this small object to propose additional functions.
Final design iterations sharpened the concept and focused on building functions of the “pin
tray robject” around the notion of proximity.
This work led to the statement that the closer a person is to Yōkobo, the more intimacy
the function expresses.
Having defined clearly the concept the product designer sketched various propositions.
Then he worked on 3D modelling to generate a more precise vision of the forms.
Yokobo’s external shape evolved into a four-piece robot: The bowl, the central part, the dome,
and the base.
In parallel, we built a mock-up in cardboard in real size, which has informed the high
of Yōkobo, It warned the necessity of always having the
bowl horizontal to keep the keys inside the bowl.
It was also a great source of information for identifying the appropriate weight that
engines can support.
We tested bowls of various sizes and shapes that enabled the definition of the appropriate
size and depth of the bowl.
The interaction designer worked on interactions and motions.
To reinforce the link between the couple, we thought of two ways to do it.
Yōkobo enables a direct way to reinforce the link by offering to transfer motion message
to the spouse.
The indirect way concerns discussions the couple could have concerning their experiences
with Yōkobo and how it represents the welcome of their home.
To realise this, Yōkobo has two functions.
First, it expresses the state of the home through data coming from the home’s sensors.
Namely, for this prototype, data is provided by the sensors of a smart home weather station.
To create the animations expressing the state of the house, designers choose to base the
design on the human body’s reaction while facing extreme weather.
As an example, when it is freezing, Yōkobo shakes.
Second, Yōkobo welcomes people.
It mimics the person in front of it to greet it.
The designers worked on Yōkobo’s welcoming and expressing the state of the home behaviours
that enable people to feel emotion when watching Yōkobo.
Yōkobo’s shape implied a combination of four degrees of freedom.
Therefore, Yōkobo is composed of three motors: one to rotate the whole structure on a vertical
axis, one to enable the bowl to bow on a groove, and the last one to make the bowl turn on
itself.
The bowl is freely moving by gravity to stay in a horizontal position.
The three motors are hidden in the “dome” of Yōkobo.
To conclude, Yōkobo is a robject with a non-anthropomorphic shape, playing an intermediary role between
newly retired couples.
Yōkobo is designed to be unobtrusive for people and fuse into the spouses’ home.
It interacts with people while fading away to enhance human relationships.
It contributes to research in the new field of Human-Object-Human interaction.
Beyond a robject, the design approach gave the possibility to take a step aside.
It led to creating a new concept, the “sensible presence robject,” for newly retired couples
suffering from loneliness.
It proposes an object that questions the couple’s link through sensitivity.
Yokobo is both a presence in the entrance and represents a reminder of the other’s
presence.