LG Electronics, Inc
Interview with Seongmin Kim

Red Dot: What is the biggest innovation of the LG Q9 Smart Home Robot?

As a smart home hub that actively moves within our living space, it connects with smart home and IoT devices to conveniently manage their usage. In this way, it reduces the burden of housework and presents a future vision of the “zero labour home”. Using multimodal sensor technology, it detects hazards such as falls for disabled or impaired people and increases safety in the home. The Q9 also offers customised services through monitored user experience data.

In contrast to many home robots, the Q9 seems almost alive. What design strategies were crucial to enable emotional interaction while avoiding distance or intimidation?

Emotional interaction is the key differentiator from industrial robots. To overcome the technical limitation – such as the inability to fully reproduce human behaviour – we pursued a concept of “friendliness”. The design is based on the curious facial expressions and imperfect movements of a child. The aim was to convey a user experience in which small mistakes are perceived as likeable characteristics and the growth and learning of the Q9 is accompanied emotionally.

The LG Q9 is not only a functional innovation, but also an emotional one. Do you think emotionally responsive products will define a new design category?

With advances in AI software, our daily lives are changing at a rapid pace. Today, systems learn user behaviour patterns and adapt to individual tastes – in the future, products will also respond to emotions and provide physical and emotional services. The day is not far off when advanced technology and sophisticated design will form a new product design category.