Hi everyone, my name is Dominique Chen
and I’m going to present our work titled
Nukabot: Design of Care for Human-Microbe Relationships
First, I explain the context of our research.
In the recent years, research on human-computer interaction designs for non-human beings has flourished
and numerous animal-computer interaction studies have been conducted.
Indeed, many of them have been inspired by or echo with ethical and aesthetical discussions
in the field of posthumanities, by such prominent thinkers like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing.
Our research refers to the theoretical work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa who elaborates on
the relationship between soil, as in agriculture, and human beings.
Nukadoko is a traditional technique to ferment pickles
in Japan, using a mixture of rice bran, salt, and water that is
placed within a wooden, plastic or enamel bucket.
This wet mass of rice bran becomes a bed for symbiotic culture
of lactic acid bacteria, yeast, and other microbes.
The sour pickles are called nukazuke.
Generally, humans take care of the nukadoko by stirring its rice bran,
with their hands, every day.
[in this slide, the author is reading out the texts]
For our product design, we studied and introduced the concept of Yōkai.
The ethnographer Michael Dylan Foster introduced the Japanese culture of Yōkai
to the English-speaking world by describing it as
"a monster or a spirit or a ghost or a shape-shifting animal".
As a symbol of "liminality" or "in-betweenness," Yōkais have mediated
the human world and the intangible realms of more-than-human beings.
Yōkai are thought to interact with humans by speaking natural languages.
We translated this inspiration from the Yōkai culture
to facilitate the communication with our system.
and we incorporated an interactive eyeball to the wooden bucket,
and we added sensors to evaluate the fermenting status of the rice bran in realtime,
and a voice interaction functionality to let humans communicate with the microbes of the nukadoko.
This is the system diagram.
Basically, the sensors probe various biological values of the rice bran every minutes,
and store them on a cloud database. Every time a human asks a question,
or the nukabot gives an alert, scripts on the cloud server calculates
the fermentative state of the nukadoko and generates the utterances accordingly.
Here’s a scene where the human care taker asks the question “how are you?” to the nukabot,
and it answers accordingly to the analysis of its sensor data.
Here’s a scene where the nukabot gives an alert to its surrounding human care taker
by saying “you need to stir me”, based on the time elapsed
since the last stirring and the sensor data.
In her discussion on speculative ethics in more than human worlds,
Puig de la Bellacasa presents three elements of care that contribute
to the formation of human ethical attitudes toward the ecosystem of the soil,
including bacteria and microbes: accomplishment of daily maintenance, affective emotion,
and a non-normative sense of obligation to take care of non-human beings.
We consider these 3 ethopoietic elements can be applied to the relation
between the fermenting microbes of a nukadoko and the human care taker,
and we introduce them to evaluate our HCI design of the Nukabot.
We conducted experiments with six participants to evaluate the effects of the Nukabot
in terms of fostering behaviors of care and affective feelings toward the microbes.
Our qualitative analysis demonstrates that our design of the Nukabot affects positively
all three ethopoietic elements presented in Puig de la Bellacasa’s theoretical model of care.
Indeed, the conversation function proved to be not only functional in helping people
maintain their nukadokos, but also to create senses of aliveness, kinship
and ethical obligation to take care of nukadokos.
We considered the implications of such an HCI design,
such as whether the Nukabot could replace existing, traditional nukadokos.
Nukabot helps by adding additional HCI interaction channels to the existing ones,
such as touching, looking at, and smelling the rice bran,
and serves as an intermediary communication device between humans and nukadoko microbes.
However, it does not replace existing sensual interactions.
Our goal is not to create a reliance on technology to connect humans to microbes,
but rather to use technology to support humans in noticing the existence of microbes better.
[in this slide, the author is reading out the texts]
Thank you for listening.