Keller Rinaudo-A mini robot-powered by your phone

This ted talk by Keller Rinaudo is about a robot which can easily be used by anyone of any age. The name of the robot is Romo.It uses a device that we are already really familiar with is Iphone as his brain. The robot is wifi enabled and computer vision capable of just 150 bucks, which is just 1% of what these kinds of robots have cost in past.

Romo

Romo is very friendly and cute and he uses the video camera on device to follow the user's phone so whatever the user will do he will follow it. And if someone wants to explore the world with Romo, I can actually connect him from any other iOS device. So here's the iPad. And Romo will actually stream video to this device. So the person can see everything that Romo sees, and the user will get a robot's-eye-view of the world. 

The most important thing about Romo is that it is really perceptive as you actually don't have to be actually present at the same geographical location as robot to control it actually streams two-way audio and video between any two smart devices. So you can log in through the browser, and it's kind of like Skype on wheels. So it's basically the concept of telepresence.For instance an eight-year-old girl,  who has an iPhone, and her mom buys her a robot. That girl can take her iPhone, put it on the robot, and send an email to Grandmother, who lives on the other side of the country. Grandmother can log into that robot and play hide-and-go-seek with her granddaughter for fifteen minutes every single night, when otherwise she might only be able to get to see her granddaughter once or twice a year.

The reason behind choosing this ted talk is that it talks about the future of personal robotics which is happening today and we need to know the importance of personal robots so Romo is one of the best examples of it.

By having a Romo  one will be able to do whatever he or she have ever wished for like dancing like a pro, building something through it we just have to download that on Romo and execute it in real life and we can also share it easily with every other person who own a robot in the world. So for having a personal robot we don't have to spend millions it will just cost 150 bucks and one will end up with a personal robot at their home.

Another reason of choosing this ted talk was that I love robots and I am really looking forward to have my own Romo!!!
Link to the Ted talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/keller_rinaudo_a_mini_robot_powered_by_your_phone?language=en

Tom Wuzec: Got a Wicked problem first, tell me how to make toast

This Ted talk by Tom Wujec is about a simple design exercise which starts with a question and then which helps us to understand that how can we collaborate things so all this started with a simple question which was to  how to make a toast and it has three parts the whole concept behind this exercises was to let people know that how can they understand and solve complex problems.

The first exercise was to take a plain paper and without using any words, one begin to draw how to make toast. And most people draw very creatively.

Tom Wujec collected hundreds of designs some were really good and they clearly reflected the whole process but some really sucked which may be because the people couldn't understand it and there was a different logic behind it as everyone has a different way of visualizing their experience. For example some drew all about the toaster not the toast as the engineer love to draw the mechanics of this. Though all drawing were different but the only thing that was common in them were nodes and links

most drawings have nodes and links. So nodes represent the tangible objects like the toaster and people, and links represent the connections between the nodes. And it's the combination of links and nodes that produces a full systems model, and it makes our private mental models visible about how we think something works. So that's the value of these things. What's interesting about these systems models is how they reveal our various points of view.

The System Model

Second exercise was to draw 'how to make toast' but this time with sticky notes or cards by doing this people were able to draw it more clearly, with more details and more logical nodes and as they were building up their model they move their nodes around and re arranged them like Lego blocks the whole process made it easy to analyze so this was a whole essence of the design process. This whole process suggests that with the ease with which they were able to change the representation varied according to the willingness to improve the model. So sticky note systems are not only more fluid, they generally produce way more nodes than static drawings. The drawings are much richer.

The third exercise was to do it in a group. Initially it was a process which gets messier as the number of member increases but as the model is refined,it gets clear because people build on top of each other's ideas which emerges as a unified system model that integrates the diversity of everyone's individual's point of view.

Now, what's also really interesting, that the groups spontaneously mix and add additional layers of organization to it? 

The idea behind choosing this video was that it is really useful for us as from the first practices we learned that, through drawing we are able to understand the situations as systems with nodes and their relationships. Following that through second practices movable cards produce better systems models, because we can repeat much more fluidly. And then the group notes produce the most comprehensive models because we synthesize several points of view. So that's interesting. When people work together under the right circumstances, group models are much better than individual models.Its have positive results in all type of works.

So hence i have learned that next time i am confronted with an interesting challenge,I will work what i have learned from this video which is to make our ideas visible, tangible, and consequential. It's simple, it's fun, it's powerful, and I believe it's an idea worth sharing.

Link to the Ted talk

https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_got_a_wicked_problem_first_tell_me_how_you_make_toast