8. (Mis)behavioral Objects

While the movement toward granting ever more power to users is very real, can we understand it not from the viewpoint of humans, but that of the objects? How can we design the empowerment of both users and objects, but starting from the objects? Could the object then change its status and become a subject, or at least an agent? With that as our starting position, we pose the hypothesis, theoretical and practical, that in order to engage with such prospects, the objects in question must be endowed with behaviors. And rather than resorting to types of expression related to the morphology or dressing of the objects, we want to focus on the expressive capacity of movement, on the objects’ power to act as embodied fundamentally by movement, by actions that give shape to what would then be possible to describe as “behaviors”. Our approach is first and foremost a matter of art and design, while entertaining a dialogue between two other disciplines: robotics, to put into practice our reflection, and cognitive science, to better understand and prepare this new form of interaction “object-human” that we are seeking. More specifically we are looking to develop objects that misbehave, as a way for these objects to go against the function they have been designed for, and thus develop a certain subjectivity that could enable an affective relationship that is valid for itself. From a state of knowledge in art and design, and from an analysis of behaviour from the point of view of action perception, we propose a design space based on the behaviours produced and the interpretations they elicit in terms of mental states. This conceptual apparatus is put into practice through workshops during which we propose a form of collective experimentation, with the help of our modular robotics toolkit MisB KIT, open-source and accessible both to non-programmer practitioners and to developers. Following a first series of workshops, in particular the one held at TEI 2014 conference, along with the Tangible Media group from the MIT Medialab, we draw some conclusions and discuss some new perspectives regarding the development of (mis)behavioral objects.