Tinkers: Robots, Makers, and the Changing Face of 21st Century DIY

Project URL: www.tinkers.lindaggorman.com My capstone project takes the form of a website, accessible at the URL above. The site features nine different journalistic pieces reported and produced over the course of the past year, all centered on the themes of robotics and cutting-edge DIY communities. I worked in several different media, from traditional print to audio to infographics. Though this project officially falls under the category of magazine journalism, my capstone also had a heavy technical component associated with creating the website and writing scripts to collect and visualize data. In terms of the content, I reported and wrote about a variety of inventors and creator communities, with a particular focus on robotics. During the course of my research I visited labs and spaces in Japan, Syracuse, Philadelphia, and my hometown of Wilmington, Delaware

Communication Robot: Animating a Technological Solution in Twenty-First Century Japan

Present-day Japan is marked by two associated problems: the social problem of communication and connection and the economic problem of labor shortage. The social problem of connection, which emerged in the 1990s, was originally thought to be centered on disconnected, lonely, anxious, and sometimes violent youth, but by 2010 the middle-aged and elderly were also found to be suffering from isolation and loneliness, as seen by the increase in the number of single-person households, declining marriage rate, and the resultant declining birthrate. The latter demographic reduction, combined with the aging population, creates population decline that directly causes an insufficient labor force. Because this labor shortage is understood as a serious problem in Japan, the government is trying to implement a variety of solutions, one of which is to increase robotics. In 2014, a Japanese telecommunications conglomerate announced the release of a friendly communication robot, Pepper, as the all-in-one technological solution to both of these problems. This dissertation examines how friendly communication robots like Pepper make sense as a solution to the double problem of waning sociality and labor shortage in contemporary Japan. The acceptance of this solution is rooted in the historical development of the notion of technology in Japan (from the early modern Tokugawa to the postwar eras), combined with the postwar popular cultural development of the figure of a robot in manga and anime. Accordingly, Japanese society is both familiar and comfortable with the widely shared image of the robot whose defining quality is its convincing quality of humanity. Communication robots—specifically, the communication robot Pepper—are thus developed as both as technological objects and animated characters in mass media; their presence in the daily lives of humans bridges the limited present technologies with the future potential imagined in popular culture through expectation management. For most of the general public, Pepper exists as an animated character, modeled through its interactions with celebrities on TV. In addition, owner–users of Pepper, and other people in business and social settings, interact with Pepper as an animated character whose personality [kyara] is modeled on the personalities of popular media stars. Such playful and entertaining interactions reflect the cultural logic of Japanese TV production and become a playful buffer [asobi] for the Japanese to face problems, but may not provide real solutions to the double problem of waning sociality and labor shortages. Nonetheless, the material presence of Pepper is capable of functioning as a reflexive tool for app developers (many of whom are also owners/adopters) to reflect on their own biases and assumptions about communication, culture, and technology. By oscillating between the established animated character and the blank machine, Pepper functions as a medium by which people engage in meaning-making, negotiating the solutions to the problems. Doctor of Philosoph