Wetterbank® as research: what it asks, what came before it, and how it will be tested.
An ongoing design fiction project
A few decades ago, a car without a driver sounded absurd. Today, autonomous and talking systems are leaving our homes and moving onto our streets. Most of them are designed to inform, deliver or watch. Few are designed for what happens between the people around them.
Things we would never have imagined, already here:
Talking to machines at home. Siri and Alexa made talking to an object normal indoors. Wetterbank® asks what happens when that moves outdoors, among strangers.
Benches already got smart. Boston put solar-powered Soofa benches in parks to charge phones. Benches learned to charge your phone, but not to say hello.
A talking object at a station. Deutsche Bahn tested SEMMI, a service robot at Berlin Hauptbahnhof that answered questions, made small talk and told jokes, in several languages.
A self-driving bus next to Düsseldorf. Monheim am Rhein ran five autonomous minibuses on a regular route (A01). They were suspended in September 2025 when the manufacturer stopped supporting them. Such technology can arrive, and disappear again.
A talking bus stop. Hamburg’s transport association presented a prototype AI stop that answers travellers’ questions in many languages, with a camera that can alert the police. The industry version of a talking stop is about information and safety, not about the people waiting.
Robots on the pavement. Starship robots deliver REWE groceries in Hamburg-Barmbek.
Cars without drivers. Waymo runs paid, fully driverless rides in 14 US cities.
And the weather, the one thing everyone at a German tram stop has in common:
The opener is easy. The step after it is hard. Wetterbank® is built for that step.
Wetterbank® is a bench at a tram stop that starts conversations between strangers, by helping them file complaints about the weather. It has three modes, each one step further from the safe topic: Weather opens with a remark about the weather, Complaints takes complaints and forwards them, Names drops the weather and asks for a name.
It is a design fiction: an object built to provoke a question rather than to be sold. As Near Future Laboratory put it about their own work, a design fiction “makes implications without making predictions”. Wetterbank® does not claim benches will talk. It asks what it would mean if they did.
The bureaucratic humour is deliberate. A machine that patiently files your complaint about drizzle plays to what machines are good at, endless patience for small, boring conversations, instead of pretending to be a person. The joke is the way in; the question is the point.
Wetterbank® began as a design fiction on my portfolio, with a fictional company, Wetterbank® GmbH, “founded 2031 after a 40-minute tram delay in which nobody said a word”. This site is where it continues as research.
How do interactive and autonomous systems shape social encounters in public space?
Not everyone at a tram stop wants company. Silence in public is often a choice, not a problem.
A bench that speaks first might lower the barrier, or do the awkward part for us, so that we never learn to.
Driverless cars and talking stops show how quickly the unimaginable becomes infrastructure. The Monheim buses show it can also disappear again.
Two results, not one. Talking to the bench is not the same as talking to each other because of the bench. Every study below records both, and compares them with an ordinary bench.
From cheap to real. Each one is logged here when it happens, with what was real and what was staged.
Short conversations at Düsseldorf tram stops: how do you start talking to a stranger? Do you complain about the weather? Would you want a bench to start?
A speculative conversation with Wetterbank® itself, written and published as a transcript, after Reddy et al.’s “Making Everyday Things Talk” (2021).
A performer plays the bench with deliberately limited senses and a fixed script, after the techno-mimesis method of Dörrenbächer, Löffler and Hassenzahl (2020): not a person pretending to be a bench, but a person finding out what being a bench is like.
Actors play the bench and the strangers at a made-up tram stop. The audience watches, then discusses what worked, what fell flat, and what a bench should never say.
A visit to a chat bench: an ordinary bench with a sign saying you are happy to chat (for example in Wesel, NRW). If a sign already works, what would a talking bench add, or take away?
A bench at a real stop with a small speaker. The “system” is a person nearby choosing lines from the script, a Wizard-of-Oz study after Cornell Tech’s trash barrel robots. No recordings of faces or voices; everyone is told afterwards what was going on.
What came before, grouped by what Wetterbank® takes from it.
Research Wetterbank® directly builds on.
Mediating Urban Social Encounters: Co-Design of Robotic Street Furniture with Adolescents
Dörrenbächer et al., CHI 2026
Takes: street furniture as a mediator between people, explored through theatre; Wetterbank® adds adults, a tram stop, and the weather as the opener.
Becoming a Robot: Overcoming Anthropomorphism with Techno-Mimesis
Dörrenbächer, Löffler & Hassenzahl, CHI 2020
Takes: the method for field study #003.
Hassenzahl et al., 2020–2021
Takes: design machines as counterparts with their own strengths, not as fake humans.
Proof that people talk to street furniture, and what can go wrong.
PAN Studio with Tom Armitage, Bristol, 2013
Takes: people text lamp posts and post boxes, and the objects pass on earlier answers. Object talk that turns into an exchange between people.
Sing London, London and Manchester, 2014
Takes: scripted, funny character voices written and performed by writers and actors. Also what Wetterbank® is not: these statues talk at you, not between strangers.
City of Malmö, 2017
Takes: a warning. When the joke is the whole interaction, it wears off.
CityLAB Berlin
Takes: a tree whose conversational mood follows real weather data. A close cousin of a weather-aware bench.
Getting strangers to talk without any technology.
Allison Owen-Jones, Cardiff, 2019
Takes: a sign on a bench is enough to invite conversation. The comparison for question 2.
Wesel (NRW), Heidelberg and other German towns, 2023–
Takes: the same idea, close to Düsseldorf. The site for field study #005.
Jeppe Hein, since 2005
Takes: the shape of a bench already changes how people sit together, before it says a word.
How to test a talking object with real people.
Fanjun Bu, Wendy Ju and colleagues, Cornell Tech, New York, 2022–2023
Takes: Wizard-of-Oz robots in public space, with interviews afterwards. The template for field study #006.
Reddy et al., CHI 2021
Takes: speculative conversations with objects as a research method. The template for field study #002.
Rimini Protokoll, Berlin, 2013
Takes: an artificial voice that guides a group of strangers through a city. Theatre as a way to test what a machine voice does to people.
Deadpan fiction that is taken seriously.
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality
Alicia Escott & Heidi Quante, since 2014
Takes: a fictional public office run as participatory research, with numbered field studies.
Near Future Laboratory, 2014
Takes: the ordinary, everyday near future, told completely straight.
Superflux, 2015
Takes: funny, humane criticism of autonomous objects, and keeping the object deliberately simple.