Diego Trujillo-Pisanty, currently a student in the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art in London, has looked ahead at how future homes might be redesigned to accommodate domestic robots. Rather than build entire new forms of architecture, however, Diego suggests that we’ll first begin quite simply: retrofitting our interior environments, in often deceptively small ways, for optical navigation by autonomous mobile home systems. This will primarily take the form of peripheral additions to everyday objects, as well as a new range of optical tags that will allow certain tasks—folding blankets, for instance, or setting the dinner table—to be accomplished much easier by machines. These tags will define both physical limits and the spatial operations appropriate within them, coding the everyday home environment for the rise of machine intelligence.
After watching how seamlessly domestic robots perform everyday tasks in the Swedish tv series Äkta Människor, this proposal seems clunky – but most likely the next step before the technology becomes invisible, and thus friendlier to us.
(See also: Diego’s website)