This project addresses NWA question 68 “How can we promote and utilize creativity and innovation?” as it is part of the route Art: Research and Innovation in the 21st Century. It demonstrates the value of the performing arts as motor for innovation and reflection in a high-tech society. More precisely, it aims to answer the question how the performing arts can tackle an important challenge for the further development of social robots and other intelligent technologies, namely how to design them in ways that support effective interactions and meaningful encounters between humans and robots. Collaborations between theatre professionals and roboticists are put in position to:
(1) develop robots that humans can have meaningful and sustained interaction with. We will show what the performing arts have to offer for the development of robot behavior and HRI that is meaningful and effective as well as interesting and engaging. We will do so through joint (theatre-robotics) experimentation with skills, expertise and practices of co-creation from the performing arts.
(2) capture this creative and innovative potential of the performing arts in novel design methods. This will involve the adaptation of skills, insights and expertise from the performing arts to design, as well as rethinking design processes through the lens of co-creation in the arts, and, finally the translation of research outcomes into tools and design methods that can be used in design processes, industry and education;
(3) mobilize the creative as well as critical potential of the performing arts for rehearsing future scenarios together with users and stakeholders as well as a general audience. Artists and their work play an important role in how this project aims to bring about collective imagination and speculation about the use cases being developed in the project and more generally a future with robots.
