Before being a technical matter, design can become a way of questioning our relationship with the world. This is the perspective from which Playfool works, a studio founded by Daniel Coppen and Saki Maruyama, whose research moves between design, art and technology. Through interactive objects and installations, the studio uses play as a tool to explore new possibilities and question the habits we take for granted.

Among the projects that best illustrate this approach is (re)imitation of life, developed together with Domenica Landin as part of Watershed’s More Than AI Sandbox programme. At the heart of the work is a robotic tortoise that hosts a Large Language Model (LLM), integrated with a system of sensors that allows it to interact with its environment.

The idea is as simple as it is unusual: instead of designing an artificial intelligence that imitates human behaviour, Playfool tries to imagine a machine capable of observing the world from a non-human perspective. The tortoise is therefore not a robot designed to perform a specific task, but an experiment that puts the relationship between body, perception and intelligence at the centre.

The project is also inspired by the tortoises developed by the cybernetician William Grey Walter in the 1940s, small autonomous machines capable of reacting to environmental stimuli. Drawing on this research, Playfool brings the reflection into the present, asking what it means to attribute intelligence to an artificial system.

At a time when artificial intelligence is designed mainly to replicate human abilities, (re)imitation of life proposes a different direction. The tortoise’s body becomes a tool for exploring another form of interaction with reality, far from screens and conventional commands. Rather than trying to make machines ever more like us, the project invites us to imagine what might happen if we tried to look at the world from a completely different perspective. A small artificial tortoise, in this sense, becomes a way of rethinking not only technology, but the very meaning of intelligence.