Curator in Conversation | ICD-Lab
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Interview with Professor Michio Okada, Shun Nishimura, Nao Ouchi • 27 Mar 2026
What if the future of robotics looked less like a machine, and more like a friend?
This is the question at the heart of the Interaction and Communication Design Laboratory (ICD-Lab) at Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan. Led by Professor Michio Okada, the ICD-Lab team have spent over two decades hand-building social robots that are deliberately vulnerable, imperfect, and dependent on the humans around them.
For NCM's exhibition FRIEND, which investigates the intimate relationships between humans and machines, Senior Curator Jemimah Widdicombe sat down with Professor Michio Okada, Director of the ICD-Lab, whose research explores communication, embodiment, and what he calls "convivial robotics"; Shun Nishimura, Technical Lead at the ICD-Lab, who has spent three years developing i-Bones, one of the lab's most mechanically complex robots; and Nao Ouchi, Graduate Researcher at the ICD-Lab, who has observed how people respond to Weak Robots in exhibitions and fieldwork.
In their conversation, they explore the concept of "Weak Robots", machines that are intentionally incomplete, shaped by their environment and the people around them and why vulnerability might be more valuable than efficiency. They discuss the scissors and the human hand, the bricolage approach to design, and what it means to build robots whose personalities start to resemble their makers. And they consider what a future of convivial robotics — one that preserves rather than diminishes human autonomy and creativity — might look like.
About the ICD-Lab
The Interaction and Communication Design Laboratory (ICD-Lab) is led by Professor Michio Okada at Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan. Established over 20 years ago, the lab takes a constructivist approach to research, building things in order to understand them.
Working across design, software engineering and circuit design, the team hand-builds social robots as tools for investigating how humans communicate, connect, and care for one another. Central to this work is the concept of "Weak Robots": machines that are intentionally incomplete, dependent on the people and environments around them to function.
Rather than optimising for efficiency or capability, the ICD-Lab asks what happens when robots are vulnerable and what that vulnerability brings out in people.
About
Professor Michio Okada
Professor Okada is Director of the Interaction and Communication Design Laboratory (ICD-Lab) at Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan, where he has led research into social robotics and human-robot communication for over two decades. His work centres on the concept of "Weak Robots" — robots that are deliberately fragile, hesitant, and reliant on the support of those around them — and the idea that imperfection in machines can draw out kindness, thoughtfulness, and connection in people. More broadly, his research is concerned with what he calls "convivial robotics": designing relationships between humans and machines that preserve, rather than diminish, human autonomy and creativity.
