In the presentation this is a movie, which can be found on the Availabot site.

This particular one looks like a friend of ours. Because of short-run manufacture, the puppets can be customised very late in the process.

As the person goes offline, it falls over [laughs from the audience as it does]. As they come online, it stands up.

Engaging? I think it is! It was at the RCA design show a week or two ago and it would make people chuckle. That’s good. But what I think it better is that it’s a physical thing. You can glance into a room and see whether somebody you really care about is online, without touching the computer. You can hide it behind the monitor if you’re working really hard, and it’s much easier to ignore.

It gets all the benefits of periphery and centre just by being physical and not on the computer screen.

We’ll come back to this later.

Matt Webb, S&W, posted 2006-07-14 (talk on 2006-07-13)