School of Culture and Society

For decades Japan has been a first-mover and pacemaker with respect to the development of humanoid and android robots. This conceptual paper demonstrates how a particular android robot, the Telenoid, can be embedded within, and interpreted relative to, a Japanese conception of nature where, as pointed out by the literature, the artificial is not opposed to nature and where conventionalized idealizations in general are cherished over the original state of nature. The following three relational aspects will be used to compare this idea of nature with central design hypotheses pertaining to the Telenoid robot: (i) deliberate minimalization, (ii) enhanced access to an ideal state, and (iii) taming the wild.