SOOOOOO.. You had kids but you also want a life?  SOLUTION:

The Optimization of Parenthood is a robot arm which reacts whenever a baby placed in the bassinet cries or awakes from sleep. The arm will speed up if the baby cries and it can also offer a bottle of milk or a favorite toy.

Broke parents are often pigeonholed into being full time parents, the cost of childcare sucks every penny away so even if they want to continue their creative work, they can’t economically swing it. Its often not so much a choice as it is, what we call The Default to Suck. As a result, the parent, and in reality, almost always the mother,  loses the very creative practice they spent an entire life building.  The result? We end up on medication, angry, depressed and/or bitches who need a shower.

If however, we could eliminate much of the routine, tedious, monotony of parenting while still continuing a creative practice we will have optimized the process of parenting without loses what makes us interesting. Automatic repetitive parenting task can be transferred to devices, without affecting ‘the development of the baby’ while still letting the parent live up to their fullest breeder and artistic potential.

Winning.

Already have your robot arm laying around and just need the code to get your life back? Here you go.

This project was developed with support from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and created at the Digital Fabrication Laboratory, (dFab), CMU School of Architecture with Technical Assistants from Madeline Gannon