Quori and ‘Designs for Different Futures’ on PBS News Hour

Quori and ‘Designs for Different Futures’ on PBS News Hour

Jeffrey Brown of the PBS News Hour recently visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art and its “Design for Different Futures,” an exhibit that explores technological fears and hopes in a variety of interactive ways.

One of the objects in the exhibit is Quori, a social robot developed by Mark Yim, director of Penn Engineering’s GRASP Lab and Asa Whitney Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, as well as Simon Kim, associate professor of Design in Penn’s Weitzman School of Design.

Quori’s genderless face and frame is a key feature; its primary use is in the study of human-robot interaction, and its role in the exhibit is to raise questions about how human biases might shape those interactions as robots become more ubiquitous in society. Such dynamics were part of the original discussions Yim and Kim had with Kathryn Hiesinger, the lead curator of “Design for Different Futures,” while the idea behind the exhibit was still germinating.

Watch the segment at PBS News Hour, and read more about Quori’s role in the exhibit in “Penn Engineering and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Join Forces to Envision the Future.”