Nicoletta Radice
Internship: 75B
contact@nicolettaradice.xyz, nicolettaradice.xyz
When social isolation is required for the best of the community, can we make use of our collective memories as a tool to defeat loneliness? In these last months, Nicoletta Radice took upon a challenge which transformed into a profound journey exploring the construction of a chatbot. By feeding the bot her own memories, and memories of other people, Nicoletta created MemoryBot - a bot for memory back-up and memory exchange. MemoryBot is a fictitious web application, which you can interact with. It is a memory storage, specifically created to generate new memories in which the user can linger into. MemoryBot is not a replacement for human contact, but instead it is a speculative solution for aid and support, an exploration in the creation of artificial emotions. A project where human emotions and memories are mixed up by an emotionless machine.
make sure you visit this page from Chrome and from a Desktop enviroment, sadly the desktop version is without voice but the voice will be available at the graduation show
THESIS
Brainchild of Humanity
In my thesis I investigate the empathic relationship between humans and robot/interfaces. I have always been fascinated by robots since I was a child, but, at the same time I did, and still do, find them them very unsettling. There is something about this non-human factor that captivates me and that drives me to dig into this subject. I want to find out how can aesthetics assist in this process of designing empathy in lifeless machines. And what can I do, from the perspective of a designer, to make this process easier and faster? I have been approaching this subject in many different ways: I’ve been reading articles from the MIT social robots group and explored into Japan’s tradition of animism. In my study cases I focus especially on children’s social robots.
As a designer, I am a mediator in between these two worlds, exactly like I am this writer/mediator in my stories: first I write in the position of humans, then I write in the position of a robot.
This approach helped me exploring this topic in a more experimental and personal way and made me reflect on my own empathy towards the characters of the stories as well.