Designing Blo-nut: Design Principles, Choreography and Otherness in an Expressive Social Robot

Both a provocative artistic object and research artefact, Blo-nut is part of a project where we explore novel robotic behaviour away from the mimicry of complex human expressions more commonly associated with robotic form and movement. In this pictorial we start by outlining our underlining design principles for the design process and use images to describe the making, real-time GUI and the "choreographic sketching' of Blonut's movement characteristics. Finally, we argue for embracing novel and provoking 'otherness' in form and material when exploring interaction and communication with social robots.