Studying reptile owners to avoid designing reptile-like agents

We are exploring strategies for designing novel robots, or more generally, personal embodied agents. The motivation is to open up the design space for robots in everyday environments, while at the same time ground new designs in existing human interests. We have investigated human interests in caring for snakes and spiders, not to design reptile-like pets, but to understand possible interests of future robot owners. From the resulting interview data we have derived a number of possible designs of agents. These are intended to meet human interests for low-level communicating autonomous artefacts. We here present one such design, which is ongoing work that investigates how to evolve visual patterns in an open-ended play between humans and embodied agents.