“Have you ever met a patient with terminal cancer?" Takeshi Ando replies when asked about his personal reasons for founding the Aug Lab.
Before joining Panasonic, Ando worked as a university lecturer, researching robotics at the School of Science and Engineering and the School of Medicine. One of his research areas at the time was to develop technologies that support patients with terminal cancer in their daily lives.
"When cancer reaches the terminal stage and has spread to the spine, you cannot even turn over in bed because of the pain,” he says. “One of my research projects was to build a robot that could assist such patients."
The people he met during his research were patients with terminal cancer, and when he went to the hospital for a meeting, he often found out that one of the patients he had met a month earlier had passed away. "It was through these experiences that I realised that life is not something we should take for granted. In that regard, I wanted to provide a better and more enjoyable life."
One of the most significant turning points for him was when one of his relatives developed hemiplegia. At the time, Ando was researching the application of robots in the treatment of hemiplegia and was upset to see that the rehabilitation of his family member was being done manually. "I realised that the value of technology comes out only when it is implemented in the field,” he says.
With this vision of implementing technology to enable people to do what they want to do, free from boundaries, Ando quit his university job and joined Panasonic, a company that had already been focusing on robotics research. While engaged in essential technology and business development, he started a new open lab called "Aug Lab" in April 2019 to further focus on his initial objectives. It is a place to research robotics with the focus to "augment" the human body's abilities and sensibilities, leading to well-being.
The lab is an environment in which to pursue robotics not for automation and efficiency, but for enriching life in two areas: "Physical Augmentation", which improves human abilities and motion performance, and "Kansei (sense and emotion) augmentation", which aims to expand the five senses.
However, the fields of human expansion and well-being are still young and interdisciplinary. That's why Aug Lab is collaborating with not only engineers, but also internal and external designers, creators and researchers who can bring attention to questions such how one might measure well-being.
In the development of technology for well-being, what the lab focuses on is the person as an individual. Ando realised the importance of that during a workshop the lab held with The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art (RCA).
Engineers and designers from Panasonic, as well as members of the RCA, participated in a design workshop on the theme of "Augmentation" that started from interviewing people, and then led to ideation and prototyping.
The interviews were based around truly getting to know the interviewee as an individual, to try and empathaise with their situation and live in their shoes. They began with a conversation that had seemingly nothing to do with the research; what does the person like to do, and what makes them happy? What kind of life have they lived and what kind of setbacks did they have? As the interviewer shops in the city or takes a walk in the park, they try to get the same view on the world as the interviewee.
Ando says that the design thinking advocated by the RCA is not actually a process, but an attitude of thinking which forces you to try to understand a single person as much as you can. "I learned that you need to focus on 'the' person in front of you rather than just imagining a vague persona. I think that designing something means to understand others as if they were you, yourself and to sympathize with them,” he recollects.
That one particular person could be yourself. "In our lab, we take the approach that if you have difficulty empathizing with others, you should first dig deep into your internal motivation," says Ando.
That said, it’s not easy, however, to cut deep into your wants and desires. That’s why Aug Lab has also developed tools to help dig them out.
Ando points at a circular graph on the wall and pulls out a thick pile of cards with quotes that match the graph. The lab made a "Conceptual Diagram of Emotional Value" with one of its collaborators – Miratsuku. “Aug Lab has 'Kansei Augmentation' as one of the research fields. This is a diagram to organise and visualise 'what sensibility is in the first place',” he says.
The conceptual diagram, which Ando calls the "Mandala" is made up of quotes from the interviews with approximately 20 people working in Kansei-related jobs, as well as 30-40 books of literature. The quotes are aggregated into a database. The Aug Lab has made cards out of this diagram and used it in workshops for ideation.
One of the criteria for turning an idea into a prototype, says Ando, is "whether you can identify the 'super specific individual' and 'the individual's desire’ behind the idea” – That is, whether you can see the “subject” of the idea or not.
'In most cases, one of those ‘super specific individuals’ is often the person who came up with the idea themself. Ideas coming out from such an intense personal impetus generally attract other people as well, since people often have the same fundamental worries and feelings in common.
Since its establishment, Aug Lab has come up with hundreds of ideas, including the ones from the company’s external collaborators. Dozens among them made it to the prototype stage, and further refinements have been made to some of the prototypes where the value the changes they could deliver is clear.
One of them, babypapa, is made of three small robots that sing and talk in their own language. Each of them has an internal camera to record the daily lives of a child. Through the interaction with the child, the robots would record the growth of the child from the perspective of a third family member along with the child and their parents.
Babypapa is already functioning at a certain level and is organising a proof of concept experiment. “We are planning to conduct a long-term proof of concept experiment for a few months in dozens of locations to see if we can provide enough value to make users say they want to keep it even if they have to pay,” Ando says.
However, he says that the data alone doesn’t provide even 0.1 per cent of a child's overall happiness. "Our next step would be to focus on the relationship between babypapa, children and parents to see how babypapa's movement changes the parent-child relationship,” Ando explains. “I think measuring the well-being of everyone involved with the product, not just the user themself, would be a difficult but worthy challenging subject.”
Aug Lab will continue to brush up and measure further, while also creating new ideas. Often, when developing a new technology or product or service, what companies often talk about is the "probable" demand for "someone.
Aug Lab instead crosses the subjective perspective of confronting a single person – whether it is you or someone else – and the objective perspective of measurement and analysis, trimming away the ambiguity. Such pure aspirations and desires are essential in the pursuit of robotics creating a better life for people and not for improving productivity or efficiency.
That's why the lab keeps asking the question – What is the "subject" of that well-being?
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
