Designer, researcher, robot whisperer.

This is how multidisciplinary designer, Madeline Gannon identifies herself. Gannon spoke at 6 p.m. on Wednesday in the Kocimski Auditorium in the College of Design as part of the Cyborg Sessions workshop. This special workshop was presented by the ISU Computation and Construction Lab in order to promote women in robotics.

In the past, women have been underrepresented in design professions. Design has been transformed by new technologies that create opportunities for changing this gender imbalance and may be tools of feminist practice.

The workshop was hosted for six weeks and attended by 21 students who learned how to program robots and incorporate them into making drawings and paintings. This provided women with access to computational tools and enabled them to explore advanced technologies.

Gannon touched on some of these new technologies during her lecture, by describing her work with various robots. Her path to this line of work may seem unconventional to some.

At Florida International University, Gannon graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in architecture and a Master of Architecture degree, going on to hold a Masters of Science in computational design from Carnegie Mellon University. Crossing disciplines has had both its challenges and freedoms for Gannon.

“The benefits are that you can approach with an amateurish vigor, you don’t know what to do. The challenges are that you don’t know what to do, it’s like going down a rabbit hole,” Gannon said.

Currently, Gannon is working with a company called ATONATON, based out of Pittsburgh. There, they research how to better communicate with machines, which works well in a post-industrial city. Gannon provided visual elements such as photos, videos and computer programs showcasing the kind of work she’s done.

She highlighted the importance of the elements of design that go into robotics as well as the key geometry element that goes into bringing the program that’s on the computer out into the real world. Since the lecture was titled, “Robots are creatures, not things”, Gannon emphasized the connection she feels toward robots by comparing her work with these machines to trainers and beasts.

In 2016, Gannon worked for the Design Museum London’s exhibit, “Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World.” Gannon left a robot unsupervised for six-months, except for a nanny cam that Gannon could access to watch as well as various social posts discussing the robot.  She noticed that the people that came to the exhibit could cultivate a meaningful bond with the machine.

“To see it respond in a lifelike way, it’s really hard not to project our emotions on it and not think of it in a lifelike way,” said Gannon.

After the lecture, the Cyborg Sessions held an exhibit to showcase the work of six weeks by creating an art gallery full of the student’s work. Those who participated in the session worked on two main projects.

One, used a small robot to draw a simple turtle with a marker while being programmed by the students and encouraging them to connect with the machine as if they were the robot. The second project lets students work with robotic arms with paint brushes attached to them in order to create strokes and paintings.

Students that attended the lecture enjoyed asking Gannon questions as well as seeing the work of fellow-students in the post-lecture exhibit. One student found Gannon’s work especially interesting.

“I think it’s interesting that she’s contextualizing ordinary things and making them into technology,” said Judy Long, graduate student in integrated visual arts.