Ory Yoshifuji × Miyuki Tanaka | Can “serendipity” be designed?

The Good Design Award 2021, the winners of which were announced in October 2021. However, the program has not finished yet. “Focused Issues,” which organizes a special team (Focused Issues Directors) to reveal a tide of design from a different viewpoint of selecting Award winners, and to present the issues and the future possibilities as “recommendations,” is still underway.

Miyuki Tanaka, one of Focused Issues Directors and a curator/producer, upholds the theme of “design that takes time.” Even though it cannot be evaluated straight away, it is believed that someone we have never met will find it worthwhile one day, and supplement the incompleteness of human beings little by little. How can we achieve such design?—This is the issue behind this theme.

The product that Tanaka herself paid special attention to during the screening process was the “Avatar Robot Cafe DAWN ver.b,” which allows users to work at or visit the cafe remotely, and Avatar Robot OriHime, both of which won the Good Design Grand Award. Ory Yoshifuji, CEO of the producer company Ory Laboratory Inc., has been working on the development of OriHime for more than 10 years since 2009. In the corner of Avatar Robot Cafe DAWN ver.b, where customers continue to pop in and out from before lunchtime, what insights did Tanaka receive from the interview with Yoshifuji?

Loneliness is the state of “feeling miserable About being alone”

Tanaka I regularly have opportunities to work with people with disabilities to produce many types of expressions. I contacted you because I thought the reason that you developed OriHime and the issue behind it, which I heard during the screening process, has something in common with the reason for my own work. In particular, what you mentioned at the award ceremony, “This society is standing on the assumption of ‘mobile bodies’” stood out in my memory. I found it very meaningful that you raised a question that people take their ability to visit a place for granted.

The Avatar Robot Cafe DAWN (hereinafter Avatar Robot Cafe) is a cafe that utilizes the remote-controlled devices “OriHime” and “OriHime-D,” which can be controlled no matter a user’s age, gender or presence of disabilities, letting people with disabilities engage in a service trade.

Well then, visiting this cafe is nothing different from using any other cafe. I don’t really feel the presence of OriHime, in a positive sense. I can communicate with a person behind it very smoothly.

Yoshifuji Thank you. I’m so honored.

Tanaka So, I would like to hear from you About how you developed OriHime and the reason why you launched Avatar Robot Cafe in detail. First, please tell us About the issue you became aware of initially. You are working on “solving loneliness”; how do you define “loneliness”?

Yoshifuji I think it is the state of “feeling miserable About being alone.” Conversely, if a person doesn’t consider the situation a problem, that person is not lonely, I think. I want to reduce the number of people who are feeling miserable and thinking, “There is no room for me in society” or “I may not be worth existing,” even just one person.

Tanaka Does that idea come from your experience?

Yoshifuji Yes. When I was a primary school student, I got sick and after that, I couldn’t go back to school and became secluded for a while. By being unable to bring myself to school, I started asking myself, “Is school really the right place for me?” and then, I expanded the scope of “not the right place” from school to society. I felt like I had nowhere to belong other than my own room and even lost self-affirmation for some time.

But I managed to go back to school when I was in the third year of junior high school. After I graduated, I went to industrial high school because I liked making things. I was studying About wheelchairs there, and the wheelchair I made was picked up by several media. After that, I had many requests asking, “I would like you to make this kind of product,” from various people. While I talked to those people, I learned that many people were feeling lonely.

Tanaka You started recognizing your own issue, the feeling of “not fitting in anywhere,” as an issue of the entire society.

Yoshifuji Back then, I was in contact a lot with elderly people, but I thought, “Elderly people have to consult a high school student in this society. This is weird.” The discrepancy between average longevity and health expectancy is About 10 years. I knew that we lose physical mobility as we age. But when I was talking with many elderly people, I realized that losing the ability to go out, which they used to have, leads to loneliness. I thought, “This must be solved.”

The reason OriHime is not humanized

Tanaka How did you get to the idea of creating communication robots like OriHime from that experience?

Yoshifuji At the beginning, I was making wheelchairs, aiming to “enable anyone to go anywhere.” But then, I realized that “there is no point going out if there is no friend to accompany them,” and started to seek a way to make AI robots a substitute for friends.

However, as I progressed with the development, I came up with a question, “Can a situation of a person talking just with an AI friend be called social reintegration?” Thinking About my own experience of returning to school, there always were meetings with real people. Also, when I started up a new group to meet people in the local community, attending group activities, or going out for a drink with members as part of self-discipline, I realized that “having a role” makes it easier to get into communication.

Keeping that in mind, I came round to the idea that talking with or meeting other people is the right solution to feelings of loneliness. However, there was no tool to supplement communication ability, while there were many welfare devices aiding vision, hearing, or leg functions. Then, I launched the development of OriHime from around 2009.

Tanaka Was it in the same sort of shape from the beginning?

Yoshifuji No, it wasn’t. It was a lot more like a human and even had two legs to walk with. But as we carried on with the development, we got to the current shape, which is like a little Noh mask. Which is to say, “our bodies” have too much information when we communicate with someone.

We often say, “Look at the other person’s eyes when we talk.” However, even though we try to imagine what the other person is thinking while looking at the eyes, our brain cannot handle excessive information, such as the eyebrows, eyelashes, skin, and hair. As a result, the brain ends up cutting out such information “just like that.”

I believe, by minimizing visual information like OriHime, we can make communication by understanding each other’s minds. For example, I like the latest video games with high-quality graphics, but there still is imaginative power that can be stimulated only by good old pixel graphics.

Tanaka You mean, you dared to leave some room for the imaginative power of people who see it. I have found this issue, when we see people with visible disabilities, sometimes their characteristics other than their disabilities, such as personalities or preferences, do not necessarily seem outstanding on first sight. This may not be limited to people with disabilities. But there seems to be some able-bodied people who cannot think of the other person’s personality, especially when the person has a physical disability, because they get a stronger impression from the bodily characteristics as visual information than the inconvenience the person is feeling.

Yoshifuji I see. I have been aware of a similar issue, so, I wanted to add some flicker to its first impression by mixing fearfulness, weirdness, and loveliness into OriHime. I aimed to achieve a design that makes people guess, “Does this person have this kind of personality?” by the voice of the person behind. But lately, people have changed their opinion About spooky OriHime and started thinking it is “cute” (laughs).

We can be “present” without actual attendance or image

Yoshifuji From a practical standpoint, a smaller size and lighter weight is easier to carry around. You can attach rollers if you want it to move around by itself, so the body should be expansive.

I once scraped off everything and just left a neck, but with this form, it was difficult to stimulate imaginative powers toward a person behind. As a result of considering the best design to exist in the real world with both convenience of carrying and easiness to stimulate imaginative powers, we reached the current design.

Tanaka Well, it is amazing that it can make us feel “presence” with little information. It is not showing the image of a person behind, and what I am seeing is the same OriHime, but I can sense the “presence” of each person.

Yoshifuji I define “presence” as a state whereby the recognition of “presence” from people around the subject and the feeling of the subject of “existing here” agree with each other. Viewed in this way, whether or not a real person or image exists there doesn’t matter.

Tanaka That means, feelings of “presence” can be met because we are sharing the feelings of experiencing the same place and incident, as well as having real-time communications without time lag, not because we are seeing the other person in a one-sided manner.

Yoshifuji That’s right. After all, “presence” is all About recognition. Because our presence here itself is not proven by anyone and we haven’t even had a handshake, so, neither of us really knows if the other exists. I may be a hologram or a robot inside.

For that reason, we only have to produce a situation where I recognize that I exist here and the person in front of me exists there, and vice versa for the other person. That is the same as theatrical shows and novels. We find lives in people who don’t really exist. What we should pursue is using imaginative powers, and OriHime is media for that.

Tanaka I can understand well About your intention regarding the design because I could hear the background story in detail, but wasn’t it difficult to have people understand it at first?

Yoshifuji You are right. Up to around 2012, almost no one wanted to use what I worked so hard to create. But an ALS patient started using it in 2013, and I also started traveling for a nationwide lecture tour together with Banda, my best friend and a bedridden patient, through OriHime, then the number of users increased little by little.

Even so, it was still difficult to work by using OriHime back then. Also, some of the parents of the special-needs school students said, “Our children wouldn’t be able to work like Mr. Banda, who can engage in intellectual labor.” So, I thought over what job can be done by anyone, and reached the idea of Avatar Robot Cafe as a result. That was 2018, so I spent About 10 years without getting understood since I first came up with the idea.

Meetings without intending to meet

Tanaka Letting people work, or other words, letting people have roles—how did you come up with this idea?

Yoshifuji I don’t really like these kinds of thoughts, “Just being alive is enough” or “You can be just as you are.” I know these kinds of words can save people sometimes, but they are not adequate if the person who received the words doesn’t really agree with them.

Most of the time, we need a reason to be “present.” For instance, if you are in a school classroom and there is someone from another classroom there for no reason, you would say, “Why are you here? Go back to your classroom.” It is the same in online games. We can meet many people through avatars, but we still have the purpose of playing games.

Tanaka Yes. We do need a reason.

Yoshifuji By existing there, we can meet people or find new insights as a result, but we need some sort of mission to bring ourselves there. We might get a new job by meeting someone at a bar by chance, but I don’t think there are many people who wander around a city or go to cafe to ask for a new encounter.

So, people wouldn’t want to use the robot OriHime if they don’t have any reason “to go and do something.” We cannot attract people without a purpose, but communications can go more smoothly when there is no purpose.

Tanaka That was the reason you aimed to use OriHime for the purpose of “working.” You think discursive conversations wouldn’t be generated without a purpose. In fact, staff of Avatar Robot Cafe are having conversations like “Hi, XX, long time no see” among them outside their service hours.

Yoshifuji I think incidental conversations are important, but I don’t want to push it too far. In my mind, Avatar Robot Cafe is a place to “meet people without intending to meet.”

First of all, taking an order saying “Hi, I’m XX, I will be in charge of your table today” is straightforward as “a reason to be present.” Then, explaining About the cafe and moving to a random chat. Just like that, people who came around for coffee or a meal naturally communicate with bedridden people who cannot go out at all. I am thinking About inducing such incidental meetings to increase event probability.

We call such technologies that generate incidental relationships “Relation Tech.” By creating an environment where the number of people to meet or to build relationships can naturally increase without the aim itself of meeting people, we are working to solve the issue of loneliness. I want to be able to create such relationships by using the technology, even when people’s physical mobilities are limited.

Tanaka It is a good idea to start with simple physical work like service trade as a first step. It is providing the first opportunity to take on the challenge of many other jobs. If you have a disability, doing physical work can be difficult.

Yoshifuji That’s right. What is more, the encounters here sometimes have led to opportunities to work elsewhere, and we have already seen 30 such cases. It’s not that customers come here to recruit someone, but for people who have built relationships by “meetings without intending to meet,” it is naturally leading to a next job. For example, someone says, “I want to do some other jobs as well,” then the other person responds, “Can I offer a position in this job sometime soon?” It is interesting that two parties head to another opportunity without intending to do so.

Beyond recognizing humanity as a “function”

Tanaka Thirty cases, that is a great achievement. While I was hearing your story today, I thought there are many things we can learn from the processes that you worked so hard on without being influenced by the mainstream or losing yourself. You have been literally working on “design that takes time” for more than 10 years.

The discussions on human augmentation using technologies tend to be derived by approaches such as “making humanity strong” or “making something beyond human.” I assume it hasn’t been easy to work on a welfare device like OriHime amid such a tendency.

Yoshifuji I think that sort of approach is interesting and I like it. What I want to achieve in the end is “solving loneliness,” and the robot is just a tool. Sometimes I feel like making humanized robots, and I myself like trying the latest technology, but that should be just a pastime for me.

Tanaka You mean, one day it may not be a robot?

Yoshifuji Possibly, it may become a hologram or something. It will be a challenge of how to create a sense of “presence” through a hologram that has no solid body.

Tanaka If you actualize that, we will see many more different possibilities. I can’t wait to see it!

Yoshifuji I want to expand this cafe itself further, of course. But there is another challenge I also want to take on. This is funny, but when I visit places through OriHime, I start feeling like going there in real life too. I traveled to Egypt through OriHime before, and I still remember the images of grilled chicken and inside of a house that a local resident showed me. Since then, I have been wanting to go there one day. I want to work more to increase places that I feel like going or that I have a relation to.

Also, by using a technology like OriHime, I want to go one step ahead of seeing human as a function. I will keep developing the technology to create a situation where people meet each other naturally, just like friends meet.

Tanaka Thank you very much for telling us About your story in detail.

There is this opinion that disability is not an issue of individuals, but rather is derived by a discrepancy in the relationship between individuals and society. Because of the COVID-19 crisis, many people experienced inconvenience by restrictions on traveling and communication methods. However, there are people who experience such situations constantly, not just in the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone has a fundamental desire to connect with other people or to be helpful.

OriHime, which works on issues related to human dignity, has attracted so much attention because many people have begun to take notice that the recovery of humanity is required now in this society where economics and efficiency are prioritized.