Q&A with Madeline Gannon

When I was in high school, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the very first time. And wandering through its exhibition halls, I found myself staring at the building instead its spectacular art: the throngs of people cascading down the grand staircase; the light flooding through the sculpture court yards; ebb and flow of crowds near iconic pieces. That's when I thought I might be an architect in the making.

Madeline Gannon

My architectural background is fundamental to how I think about and explore the future. In my work, I take my hypersensitivity to how people move through space, and invent ways to embed this spatial understanding into machines. This affords me a divergent, outsider's point of view on how these machines might join us in the built environment.

Madeline Gannon

My work is inspired by a deep curiosity for the future. This often involves a decent amount of day dreaming, asking a lot of what if questions about the future, and then setting off to make these questions a reality in the present.

Madeline Gannon

Good design challenges assumptions about the way things are and shows ways they could be. As designers, we have the liberty to wander amongst different silos of disciplinary knowledge and offer novel perspectives on entrenched problems. Our insatiable curiosity drives us to conceive and create worlds that are full of alternative futures.

Madeline Gannon

Every aspect of Mimus — from the interaction design to her physical environment — is designed for visitors to forget they are looking at a machine, and instead see her as a living creature. This lets us use the robot’s body language and posturing to broadcast a spectrum of emotional states to visitors: when Mimus’ sees you from far away, she looks down at you using a fairly intimidating pose, like a bear standing on their hind legs; when you walk closer to her, Mimus approaches you from below, like a dog that is excited to see you. When something responds to us with lifelike movements — even when it is clearly an inanimate object — we cannot help but project our emotions onto it. For Mimus, her body language acts as a medium for cultivating empathy between museum goers and a 1,200kg pile of metal and motors.

Madeline Gannon

How sentient machines should engage in our daily lives is an active area of research and debate. However, part of the problem — and perhaps root of our collective anxiety — is that people have very little agency to participate in making this decision. We feel as if this technology is happening to us, not with us. My ambition with Mimus was to ask these tough questions surrounding human-robot relationships. Taking these questions out of the lab and into a public setting gives an opportunity for people to grapple with these issues themselves.

Madeline Gannon

Empathy is important for every designed interaction, not just with machines. Empathetic interfaces — ways of creating a shared understanding between people and the built environment or technology, — is an oversight in the software and machines we encounter on a daily basis. I’m excited that this is starting to change, and that more and more people are beginning to incorporate principles of Human-Centered Design into technology.

Madeline Gannon

Focus on encouraging an unbridled curiosity and enthusiasm for the world around you. Over time, these ingredients will grow into a confidence and a tenacity that will make you undeniable.

Madeline Gannon