Born With Love
According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 63% youth surveyed in US suffer high rates of loneliness, anxiety and depression. The mandatory epidemic lockdowns have forced them to stay indoors in foreign environments which are neither personal nor cozy, far from their loved ones.
Isolation and staying at home for a long time make people feel psychologically lonelier than ever before. Designers at TCL X-Lab invented Xiaoti, a companion robot, aims to create a friendly and trustworthy relationship with its owners to solve this problem.
Born With Love
According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 63% youth surveyed in US suffer high rates of loneliness, anxiety and depression. The mandatory epidemic lockdowns have forced them to stay indoors in foreign environments which are neither personal nor cozy, far from their loved ones.
Isolation and staying at home for a long time make people feel psychologically lonelier than ever before. Designers at TCL X-Lab invented Xiaoti, a companion robot, aims to create a friendly and trustworthy relationship with its owners to solve this problem.
To Bring You Closer
Xiaoti was born from TCL designers' exploration and insight into the cultivation mechanism of human emotions. Through desktop research on scientific papers, we concluded that there are 3 required aspects that once balanced allow humans to generate emotional connections.
First - Empathy, an ability that we designers are known to master, is the ability to sense feelings and emotions. To foster empathy between persons and items, storytelling helps to make things more vivid, giving Xiaoti a background story, setting up the room for a possible pleasant connection.
Designing Xiaoti as emotionally vulnerable was crucial to improving likability and confidence, Xiaoti can be seen and understood by others clearly, and this trust helps to strengthen the human-robot relationships.
To Bring You Closer
Xiaoti was born from TCL designers' exploration and insight into the cultivation mechanism of human emotions. Through desktop research on scientific papers, we concluded that there are 3 required aspects that once balanced allow humans to generate emotional connections.
First - Empathy, an ability that we designers are known to master, is the ability to sense feelings and emotions. To foster empathy between persons and items, storytelling helps to make things more vivid, giving Xiaoti a background story, setting up the room for a possible pleasant connection.
Designing Xiaoti as emotionally vulnerable was crucial to improving likability and confidence, Xiaoti can be seen and understood by others clearly, and this trust helps to strengthen the human-robot relationships.
To feel familiar and friendly, Xiaoti requires to be expressive to clearly showcase his feelings, through body gestures, and facial expressions.
Second - Companionship. We love pets, and they are a great source of inspiration and knowledge. Pets can be seen as a form of self-reflection, an extension of the owner's ego or personality, and owners that share personal spaces and moments with pets are often more emotionally engaged. Xiaoti also has pet DNA on his design.
Third - Ownership, the sense of tangible something, is gained by the ability to control it, like adjusting the height of a chair for instance. Intimate knowledge, feelings of ownership rise with information and familiarity about the object, time allows owners to better empathize with Xiaoti. And time is a personal investment decision, once done makes the objects theirs.
To feel familiar and friendly, Xiaoti requires to be expressive to clearly showcase his feelings, through body gestures, and facial expressions.
Second - Companionship. We love pets, and they are a great source of inspiration and knowledge. Pets can be seen as a form of self-reflection, an extension of the owner's ego or personality, and owners that share personal spaces and moments with pets are often more emotionally engaged. Xiaoti also has pet DNA on his design.
Third - Ownership, the sense of tangible something, is gained by the ability to control it, like adjusting the height of a chair for instance. Intimate knowledge, feelings of ownership rise with information and familiarity about the object, time allows owners to better empathize with Xiaoti. And time is a personal investment decision, once done makes the objects theirs.
