| dc.description.abstract | It is commonly accepted that our relation to inanimate objects is different
than to biological entities. When movement comes into play, however,
this relation can bring about ambiguities and transfigure familiar
relationships between the animate and the world of things. This thesis
investigates this relationship and the role of movement. The main focus
is on humans’ perception of movement, in particular how this affects
the relationship to technological objects.
It is a known phenomenon that humans tend to focus on life and lifelike
processes. This propensity affects the creation as well as the observation
of things. As social and emotional beings, humans experience a
living presence of objects, and tend to not treat them as dead matter.
Apparent for example in emotional attachments to devices like the computer,
cell phones or robots. We have a long-standing practice of projecting
social roles onto our surrounding as a way to relate and interact
with things in the world. Differences in these relationships are affected
by the appearance as well as movement of things, a phenomenon that is
well-established, for instance, in cognitive psychology and gestalt/animation
theory, where it has been demonstrated that abstract objects
and shapes, when they move, tend to be interpreted less object-like
and more as social and animate beings. Equally, in human-robot interaction,
studies with real robots illustrate that people tend to ‘anthropomorphise,’
and attribute life-like properties to these technological objects
with certain human or animal characteristics. The affinity towards
the living affects not only the experience and observation but also the
creation of technologically animated things. For a long time artists and
inventors have been trying to mimic nature and develop technology
simulating life-like qualities. These creations, as reported in this thesis,
manifest for instance through animated creatures, artistic sculptures
and artefacts, the creation of artificial systems, and robotics.
The aim of this thesis is to learn more about the role of movement
for human perception of the animate/inanimate by presenting movement
as the common denominator on three levels. First, this thesis
contributes to the understanding of the phenomena by bringing together
work from various contexts and as such presenting an interdisciplinary
approach to the topic. Second, as a result, a novel methodology
is presented that provides a relational approach to examine move
ment as a determinant of variances in the interpretation of an entity.
Based on a feature-space, used to compare peoples’ interpretative relationship
to entities, the method allows to evaluate how an entity’s
movement characteristic affect the way thoughts and actions are directed
to them. Third, results are obtained from the application of the
methodology in an empirical study, assessing peoples’ interpretation
of a ready-made object, a technologically modified hairbrush moving
autonomously. These show that the movement of an everyday object
motivates an interpretation closer to humans and animals.
The results correspond to the findings mentioned above. However, as
the empirical work brings together people and an autonomously acting
robotic object, which lacks anthropomorphic/zoomorphic or mechanoid
morphology, in a real world scenario, it transfers these findings from
cognitive psychology and computer graphic animation to the field of
human-robot interaction. | en_US |
