Muse, Robots and Creativity
In ancient Greek and Roman stories, it was one of the nine goddesses’ daughters of Zeus that could give encouragement in art, literature, music and science areas.
It is defined as a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for an artist.
After all is inspiration, motivation, source of creativity. And CreativeMornings Lisbon September event had it all!
It took place at Beta-i once more, starting with an amazing and marvellous breakfast provided by Allways. So tasty, so yummy and wrapped in such a city view! Perfect conditions for a perfect and special event: CreativeMornings Lisbon 3rd anniversary!
The atmosphere was amazing and there couldn’t be a better speaker for this muse and anniversary event as Patrícia Alves Oliveira! She has been a volunteer for this chapter for more than 6 months and now we could see her on stage, presenting her amazing PhD project! She presented a robot, YOLO (Your Own Living Object), that she developed during her PhD research, thought to stimulate children’s creativity. YOLO was designed to engage and inspire children to create stories, being a participant in their storytelling. It has motion and touch sensors to understand how the kid is using it and was trained to react in certain ways during the story that the child is creating.
As a psychologist this work was truly challenging for Patrícia, she had to learn a lot about mechanics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), electronics and programming. It was amazing to see some videos of her during the robot’s manufacturing. Being outside her main area of studies she overcome many obstacles of this project, also co-working with many institutes and students from other areas. It is important to notice that all the manufacturing process of YOLO was made with children, they were part of the process in each step of it. YOLO construction instructions are open source, so that anyone interested can buy the materials and build their own creativity robot. It’s amazing and delightful to hear Patrícia talking about all the process, all the challenges, all the achievements!
She also talked about the psychology part of this project, mostly related to the human-robot interaction and how humans feel around these machines. Examples of developed robots all around the world were shown, from human to functional robots, and how people see them. Although there are a lot of ethical questions about this type of technology, Patrícia showed and proved the benefits of a creativity robot such as YOLO. Any child should have a YOLO. One could almost say that each and everyone needs a YOLO in their lives, to stimulate creativity and increase the motivation!
After this talk one could say that all Patrícia’s work was creative and inspiring! She developed something to stimulate children’s creativity, she was creative during the process and she made something out of the box. Something that could absolutely live with our children and make them interested in storytelling without borders and limits.
All about robots. All about muse. Can a robot be a muse? Patrícia showed that definitely yes! So here in CreativeMornings we could change a little bit muse definition.
It is defined as a person or personified force or a robot-like toy who is the source of inspiration for an artist. Or a child. Or anyone who loves storytelling!
Photos by Eglė Duleckytė, Irina Konova and Tessy Morelli
