How Do We Celebrate and Preserve Intrinsic Curiosity?

Inspiration

In a time when AI is eating the world and can seemingly provide a better answer to any question you have, we are interested in intrinsic curiosity: the innate instinct to explore, question, and seek out information for its own sake.

Kokoro

We present Kokoro: the Curious Chicken, a hat that records your spontaneous, small, joyful, sometimes distracting questions.

Interaction Metaphor

The interaction is designed around the familiar riddle, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” - a question without a definite answer, and therefore an emblem of curiosity itself. This metaphor gives the system a simple narrative logic: the chicken gathers curiosities, and the egg helps them hatch into new questions, memories, or insights.

Engineering

KoKoRo consists of two physical artifacts: a cap and an egg-shaped base station. The cap contains an ESP32S3 microcontroller with an integrated SD card, reader, components that allow for curiosity recording (button, high-sensitivity microphone, amplification board and speaker), and modules that capture context (GPS, camera).