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Most recent todos:

• Fri, Sep 19 – Sketchy Office Hours
• Thu, Sep 04 – Come to discussion section, bookkeeping, and sundry
• Fri, Aug 29 – Notebooks back in stock at the Cornell Store

       
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Mini-project 2: Infrastructural Re/Design

Goals

The goal of this second miniproject is to understand the role of infrastructure in everyday life, and practice designing modifications to infrastructure. Infrastructure has inertia: major design of new infrastructure is developed at scale by big committees and consortia; on smaller scales it works by incremental in-place redesign and relatively minor updates. Infrastructure designs have to pay attention to breaking changes both above and below the point of design.

After doing this project you will be able to:

• Analyze the impacts of existing infrastructure on a new product.
• Think of the impacts that infrastructure redesigns might have on an environment and the people in it.
• Use video and text to explore and simulate new technologies.
• Design within infrastructural constraints, including: incremental redesigns; interactions between the technical and the social; the creation of winners and losers by infrastructural choices, etc.

Assignment: Re/Design

You work for billionaire technologist Leon Skum, whose widely anticipated humanoid robot is just now hitting the market. It’s an amazing technology, but the first of its kind, so as it is deployed into diverse domestic and work environments it is running into hurdles (sometimes literally). Your job is to figure out how to design infrastructure to support it, but more importantly how to augment existing infrastructure in specific environments where the robot is used.

This miniproject will consist of re/designing three infrastructural elements that support the humanoid robot: one re/design will be new proposed infrastructure, while the two others are modifications to existing infrastructure that will be necessary for the robot to function well. You will make a video of the robot working, and encountering friction in its work. Then you will describe the three modifications in a short three page paper. We don’t expect you to build an actual robot, so you or a friend will act as the robot for the video.

Some backstory for the robot:

• weighs about 90kg
• has vision and some lidar, but it needs external video for fine motor operations
• active battery life of 6 hours, fewer if lethargic, and needs 2 hours to charge
• sold with a charging station (about the size of a minifridge)
• dextrous enough to open drawers and move objects, but its hands don’t have touch sensation so it can’t currently, for example: unload a dishwasher; plant a seedling; change a baby; or fold and hang laundry (or similar fine motor control tasks with soft or delicate objects).
• about as smart as an LLM is now, meaning able to interact, but also prone to mistakes, errors of context, mis-recognition, and hallucinations. In a physical world the robot could be dangerous or make serious mistakes with real-world implications – unless it is assisted by a compliant environment.

Project components:

The Video:

• a single video submission
• describes the environment and work of the robot in that environment, and should demonstrate the insufficient or incorrect infrastructure you will redesign.
• should be 20 seconds to 60 seconds. We will only view material up to 60 seconds and ignore the rest.
• should be polished enough, narratively and in terms of visual quality, that we can understand what is going on. Hint: share it with peers without explaining much, and see if they can recount what you meant to communicate without you helping them.
• does not need to be more polished than that bare minimum of communication.
• can be with or without sound, dialog.
• should NOT have credits/titles. Cold open, cold close. It can have subtitles if the robot speaks another language than English, or other information graphics that help the view understand what’s going on.
• will be submitted via canvas (see assignment page for accepted video formats).

Your video should communicate three key points:

• The environment where the robot works and is underserved by existing infrastructure. Finding the right environment/tasks is the design space that you should hold open for a while, and perhaps make some drafts around. We encourage you to try and find an environment and reasonable robot tasks that can clearly communicate inadequate infrastructure for a humanoid robot. Do you work at the Statler? In a lab? Dorm rooms are fine, but perhaps lazy depending on how you do them. Don’t choose an environment where it will be difficult for the viewer of the video to understand what’s going on, where to look, why the robot is doing what it’s doing, etc.
• The robot’s task/s in the environment. Domestic cleaning robots are the go-to, but what about a robot that guards your drinks at the party? A robot that keeps score of arguments with your roommate? A robot that helps you serve coffee during your shift at Green Dragon? It can be physical work, emotional work, aesthetic work, etc. You won’t be scored for creativity, but use it! The task/s should be clear.
• Why each design/redesign is necessary for the robot to be a success. These should be shown in context of use. Does the robot successfully fill cups of water, but knocks unexpected containers off the table? Does it have great icebreaker lines but can’t read social queues? Does it pick apples well but scare visitors?

The video may also feature the new redesigns, but this is optional and is not part of the rubric. Moreover, it will make it harder to fit everything into a minute, and make the video production more complicated. That said, if you have a great idea of how to fit it all in, that’s fine. You’ll still need to write the next section, though.

The Three Re/Designs

Each re/design is on its own single page, no more no less. Each of the three re/designs has three parts:

• First, at the top of each page should be a header that includes: Name: [Name of Infrastructure Being Re/Designed] Marker: [The Exact Second in the Video Where Infrastructure Problem is Identified]
• Second, there should be a textual description of how the robot is underserved by existing infrastructure. (2-4 sentences, depending on how communicative the video is)
• Third, a drawing and/or textual description of how the infrastructure will be designed/redesigned to make the work for the robot (or the people around it) more easy. (About 1/2-2/3 of the page) Designs one and two should be redesigns of existing infrastructure, the third can be as well, but can optionally be a proposed new piece of infrastructure.

Please remember what we covered about infrastructure in lectures: when redesigning one has to pay attention to upstream/downstream dependencies; think of the interaction between the technical and the social; target incremental change (often the least change possible); there may be winners and losers. To be clear, we expect some discussion of how / for who these redesigns might make the environment harder or easier to be or work in, or have unexpected impacts. It’s perfectly alright to conclude that the redesign is so narrow and straightforward that there will be no unintended consequences. If, however, a TA can think of an implication of the redesign that you do not mention, but is so obvious that you should have thought of it, they will grade accordingly.

Lastly, we’re giving you a lot of leeway in this assignment. We expect many different approaches and encourage you to enjoy the process. We imagine that some of the infrastructure you address will be very technical, depending on the environment, and in other cases it will be less technical but needing change because of the new (humanoid robot technology) that relies on it. We don’t prefer one to the other, rather we just want either approach well explained and well thought through. Finally, our no magic rule applies: the tasks and re/designs should be credible enough one could imagine them in the real world, even if they aren’t quotidian. In all cases, good redesigns will be as narrow and non-breaking as possible.

Your project is due electronically via submission to Canvas by 11:59pm on Monday, Oct 27

There are unending AI slop videos of humanoid robots, many of them disturbingly sexist. To save you some mental anguish I’ve put together a small list of 2025 videos to give you a sense of the state of the art:

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