This is a project about technology. Not in the context of laboratories, experts, philosophers, futurologists, science fiction writers or academics but in the context of everyday life, of non-experts — the consumers and beneficiaries of technological artefacts. It is about the products that evolve from technological research and development surviving this complex journey to become a part of our domestic lives.

The journey of a technology from the laboratory to the home is long and arduous but ultimately happens in quite predictable ways. The majority of products have a lineage that goes back through countless generations, each one a small iteration of the previous. 

By accepting this lineage, the designer can do two things: First, project current emerging technological development

to create Speculative Futures, the Hypothetical products of tomorrow. And second, break free of the lineage to imagine Alternative Presents: Design proposals that utilise contemporary technology but apply different ideologies or configurations to those currently directing product development

One of the abiding objects used to represent technological potential is the robot. Robots and their various raisons d'être tell many stories about the role technology plays in our lives making them the perfect candidate on which to make this study.

By viewing the robot as a product rather than a technology it is exposed to a different set of rules that will be used to inform the design of a series of speculative proposals which aim to introduce new ways of thinking about robots; their forms, functions, 

our relationships and interactions with them and their meaning not as visions, props or demos but as real things in ourhomes.

This is a project about robots, but at all times it should be seen as an enquiry into (domesticable) technology itself. The methods described here could equally be applied to nanotechnology, to digital technology, to synthetic biology and so on. The common denominator being us; the people who use, who benefit from, are modified by, who delight in, who desire and who increasingly rely on technology and the products that are born of it.