Figure 1: Image of participant getting the tulip share card.
<aside> 👁️🗨️ This project is for the ITD track of Neighborhood Navigators. Focussing on the future of non-humans living within the society and being part of communities. “How could these robots add social value?”
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The case of Neighborhood navigators prompted to envision different ways in how robots in the future can become part of society and next to taking task fulfilling activities look at how they can form a new way of connection between people and add to social cohesion in the neighborhood.
Team Tony thought about this a lot for the past 20 weeks and took many questions about the future into consideration. “Do we want robots to take over all tasks of humans?”, “How to make sure robots can create more opportunities for people to interact with eachother instead of lessening the need for interaction?”, “ Will people actually know their neighbours in a digital future?“ & “How can robots encourage people to do something good for others or the world?”.
Eventually this led to us exploring robots in the context of the market space in the Netherlands, as this is a place were also people with more different viewpoints, wants and needs come together. It was interesting for us to look for a way to connect different types of people to each other, in a way that was exciting and would not take too much effort. This how we created “Tony’s Buy and Share!”
Tony’s Buy and Share is a concept that includes 2 robots changing the flower buying experience at Dutch Markets. Tony lowers the boundary of meeting your neighbors and encourages you to pay attention to the people around you and your neighborhood.
It does this through scanning them and recommending Delft market-goers a flower type. After this the user can decide to buy a bouquet (of 10 flowers) of their assigned flowers. If they choose to do so, they later also get the option to share 2 of the flowers of their bouquet to a random other market goer. If they do so they will themselves get a bouquet of 8 and 2 loose flowers + a card to put in Tony Junior, who will deliver them to a stranger. This allows neighbors to feel more connected and paints a beautiful picture of how easy and impactful one random act of kindness can be.
Keywords: Market | Acts of Kindness | Connecting
In figure 2 the appearance of Tony and Tony Jr. is drawn out how we would imagine it. The robots clearly resemble each other which is important to show they are a pair. We would also like to make the eyes of Tony Jr. and the head of Tony himself move. The hand of Tony has a flower with a touchsensor that lights up when the user decided to share their flowers with another market passenger.
Figure 2: Part of poster with concept visual and Why, What & How
The flow of the user will be like this (see figure 3). For the interaction with the screen you can click or zoom in on figure 4 which has the steps and the technologies described in detail.
Figure 3: Concept in interaction steps
Figure 4: specific interactions
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