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Little Brother
2018 | A robot design that is critical of the substantial lack of creativity in British primary schools.
Little Brother is a response to a brief to identify and tackle a 'tragedy of the commons' in British education. I isolated the problem of primary schools sidelining creative lessons to focus on SATs subjects. Further interviews with teachers confirmed the enormous pressure put on children, teachers and schools to perform well in their SATs results. Under this pressure, our primary schools often fail to make time for teaching art, music or performance, subjects not included in SATs, but that have a clear benefit on the pupils, economy and wider society.
Little Brother is a speculative product set up to help schools enforce this lack of creativity, extrapolating and exaggerating the real state of our primary schools. Sitting inside each classroom, Little Brother observes and listens to taught curriculum to make sure time is only being spent on SATs subjects.
Though a speculative project, Little Brother's functionality has been designed around real software and hardware capabilities.
With data re-inforced by a wide enough school roll out, Little Brother's neural networks could be trained to accurately recognise the perceived SAT value in each moment of classroom teaching.
The overall aim of this project is to highlight and criticise a real problem - for this, the design needed to sit just uncannily outside the norm.
Little Brother is recognisable as a technical entity for viewers to focus on the main idea, yet unnerving enough not to be assimilated with the everyday.
Little Brother's presence was prioritised in the design of it's child-like appearance, pseudo-friendly graphics and kinetic movement.
A full write up of the research, ideation, prototyping and execution can be found here.
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