georg klein : : venture doll

It is a phenomenon of our globalised world of commodities that the selection of products on offer seems to be growing increasingly diverse and yet increasingly similar. Faced with supermarket shelves, we find it ever harder to make choices. All of the goods on offer promise a lot, and all of them try to stand out from the crowd, whether through their design, their price or, more recently, their added ecological and health benefits. The project ‘Venture Doll’ plays with our abovementioned helplessness and confusion, with the fears and desires of buyers as well as with the promotional strategies of vendors

To this end, Steffi Weismann and Georg Klein have developed the talking robot doll Savvy™ – a fake that provides key product information in the immediate shopping situation: healthy food that won’t cost you an arm and a leg. Via a scanner in its mouth, the robot can read food barcodes, to which Savvy™ offers snappy and not always unambiguous advice. The Savvy™ advertising video with its documentation of the prototype in action in Los Angeles supermarkets promotes the robot doll as a shopping guide: