Signals of Sentiment
– When Robots Cry

#Human Machine Interaction #User Experience Design #Useless Machine
Project Overview
What is emotion? Do androids feel emotions?
The Crying Robot, also referred to as a “useless machine,” features a face marked with tears, symbolizing its ability to elicit empathy.
This android challenges traditional views on emotion and humanity, as its capability to mirror empathy and express feelings urges us to reconsider our understanding of emotion and what it means to be human in a world where machines can display and evoke complex emotions.
Contributions
Through the emoji displayed on the LCD screen eyes and tears from its “tear ducts”, and the pre-programmed board “brain”, we took a glimpse the inner workings of the computation theory of “mind”, where algorithms and data patterns converge to form a semblance of emotion, which is encoded representations of a consciousness, a binary soul navigating the complex landscape of human interaction.
Contributors
Alexia Asgari, Jingfei Huang, Mackenzie Li

Why androids cry?
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While many animals lacrimate, to clear and moisturize the eyes, humans uniquely use crying as an emotional signal. Crying communicates disbalance in the system, such as frustration, hunger, etc.

Robots have traditionally utilized efficient signals, such as alarms and lights. In this exercise, we explored the potential of robots to communicate in a way that is distinctly human.

The question remains, if both humans and robots can communicate their disbalances through tears, are they both expressing emotion?

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