I’m revisiting an old design project in TEO. It’s the soft kind of robot I would have made as a kid combined with the project I did in 2nd year. TEO’s basis was to prevent burn-out particularly in students. It was designed as a soft reminder tool that would apply pomodoro techniques via light and optimise your learning patterns to give you breaks and help your efficiency. It was essentially the idea of taking tasks like optimising and organising that you don’t have time to do as a student or at least can take out a lot of the humanity of your work and creation and allow you to do that part hassle free. 

I’m taking this idea and expanding it to a far wider application. Medicine, therapy, agriculture and the home base. By giving TEO a physical body with movements, he becomes a much larger assistant who’s far more dynamic and useful. It allows us to do more therapeutic applications like hugging, touching etc. I really love this aspect of TEO and I feel like I might end up underplaying it as I’ve felt the current day to day is very work heavy, task oriented and when something has a therapeutic angle tied into a massive workstation, it is a bit confusing. However this is a big part of the challenge and philosophy behind TEO and pitching this into words is my job. I really want to show he can be so hugely practical and then so lovingly soft and I am struggling to convey that. I am often reflecting with some sort of pessimism towards my own creation that I’m projecting from other people’s viewpoints. I do believe in soft compatible machines that can be benevolent and maybe not entirely purposeful but aesthetically valuable. 

The privacy element is in the intranet and mainframe technology that exists as TEO’s main computer. Projecting out all this for everyone in your space or just the sole user, it gives a fair amount of variability and a bit of a return to the ye old computer era where we separated the computer and ourselves. We can use this local network and allow it to extend to others to allow you to build a true private intranet of your own community, giving us the freedom from ISP’s but basing it back into physical location. I ended up taking a focus off this as it felt it diluted the overall concept. 

The bio parts of TEO when I first wrote down the idea felt really compelling and stayed with me throughout the whole project. This backwards thinking of using plants and bio-polymers to construct and power something that is seemingly digital. I begin this with the heart or really the lungs of TEO. Micro-algae is the inner tube, which generates 1000 litres of oxygen that are then stored in 72 elastic pouches that essentially act as batteries of potential energy that can be pumped into the legs of TEO and activate movement. If each pouch can stretch to a 1L capacity, we can have up to 1008 movements in a day. That’s the idea for the stats of the homebase model. Then having 3 more designed was to demonstrate the company’s intention to have more specialisation.