Little Guy

Little Guy is an artistic experiment, a lovable art robot. We are interested in investigating what, how, and why humans assign agency and anthropomorphism to technological systems. We’re also curious how the answers to the above questions are modulated by Little Guy’s subversion of traditionally sterile, shiny, manufactured techno-aesthetics: Little Guy is none of these. Little Guy is squishy, soft, and handmade (we intentionally chose crocheting as the medium for constructing Little Guy’s soft exterior because it is famously impossible to automate).

Little Guy speaks, listens, responds: we have so far built Little Guy to be a programmable, multi-functional Guy so that we can systematically study which features contribute to peoples’ perceptions of Little Guy as an agent rather than an object. Below we describe his functionality. We are currently working on devising our experimental setup to make use of these features for research.

This work was generously sponsored by the Stanford HAI Student Affinity Group program and a making@stanford Independent Study Grant. We are extremely grateful to CCRMA for providing us with space to build.

Little Guy Functionality

Coming soon...