This is a project about technology. Not in the context of laboratories, of experts, philosophers, futurologists, science fiction writers and academics but in the context of everyday life, of non-experts; the consumers and users of technology. It is therefore about the products that evolve from technological research and development and crucially survive this complex journey to become a part of our domestic lives.

For the purposes of this project the product/technology to be investigated is the robot, exploring the roles they may play in mediating, modifying, controlling and augmenting our existence, both today and in the future.

This project explores how a practice-based design methodology can be used to question what our relationship with technology could (or shouldn’t) be as experienced through interaction with products and services.

It is not about predicting futures, it is about looking at the technology currently being developed, working with the people developing it, extrapolating its development in reasonable ways and then speculating on its application through understandable, desirable and consumable products and services. These hypothetical artefacts act as a cultural litmus paper, testing the water before we commit ourselves to specific applications and unknown consequences. One of the fundamental aims of this approach is to move beyond the confines of the academic domain and facilitate a more democratic approach to thinking about technology.

One of the abiding objects used to represent technological promise is the robot. Hence it is the perfect candidate for this study. The enduring presence of the robot in our visions of the future means that it has the ability to morph, to mutate and to evolve in tune with our societal and cultural needs and desires. It reflects our current state of technological development, our hopes for the future and also our fears. The philosopher Langdon Winner suggested that: "It is not uncommon for the advent of a new technology to provide for flights of utopian fancy" (Winner, 1986, p.106). So the robot had taken us on many such journeys, from the vast humanoids of the 1940s, the synthetic humans of the '90s, to the miniature medical nano-bots being proposed today.

By viewing the robot as a product rather than a technology it becomes exposed to a whole different set of rules and expectations than those that currently inform and direct robot development. This contextual shift; from the screen and laboratory to the domestic and the everyday is aimed at introducing new ways of thinking about robots, our relationships and interactions with them and their meaning not as visions, props or demos but as real things in our homes.

_{Winner, L. (1986) The Whale and the Reactor, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press}