ISAAK.

Is there a moment when technology stops mimicking and starts expressing itself? A delicate shift. A silent disruption. Not when a machine calculates, but when it begins to interpret you.

What does ISAAK see?

In one recent installation during Milan Design Week, at Ditroit Dream art gallery, a robotic arm quietly sketched portraits of strangers. Not with perfect likeness - but with style, with expression. It didn’t aim for realism. It aimed for interpretation. And in doing so, it blurred the lines between assistance and authorship.

This wasn’t about engineering brilliance.

It was about a new emotional circuitry: a shared authorship between human presence and machine perception. At the heart of this experience was ISAAK, an interactive cobot powered by real-time algorithms. The installation, developed by Ditroit Studio in collaboration with ABB, invited visitors into a kind of machine-led portrait session: one where abstraction replaced precision, and the robotic hand became an artist’s gesture.

ISAAK didn’t simply draw.

It observed. It asked what happens when a machine, rather than replicating what it sees, begins to respond to its existence.

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This insight was inspired by the interactive project ISAAK, developed by Ditroit Studio in collaboration with ABB, and presented at the Ditroit Dream gallery during Milan Design Week 2025. https://ditroit.it/

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Thank you for the provocation

Because they reshape how we think about experience design - not just as a way of telling stories, but of co-creating meaning with systems that “see” us differently. What ISAAK offers isn’t a conclusion, but a doorway: maybe toward hybrid expressiveness or the next iteration of creative authorship(?)

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