Origins

"Rubber ducking" is a debugging technique where you explain your code to an inanimate object to find errors. It comes from an apocryphal story from a coding textbook from 1999, and it caught on, bringing the duck from the bathtub to the desktop.

It works surprisingly well. So we asked: what happens when the duck talks back?

We're exploring

Duck Duck Duck sits alongside IDEO questions into how technology shows up in our lives.

Creative companions

What does it feel like to create alongside a machine that reacts to your ideas? After all, not all of our ideas are especially good. What does it say about our experience of creativity that it can be changed or altered by large computational systems?

Open by default

We built this so you can make your own. To remix it. To improve it. To take your duck to new ponds. We want to learn what happens when AI leaves the screen, and what you discover in the process. What can we find together?

Embodied AI

Most AI lives in a chat window. Duck Duck Duck doesn't. It sits next to you. It moves. It reacts. We relate to it differently. We bring a different set of assumptions, meanings, contexts, and relationships. We project emotion. We imbue animacy. What happens when it responds in kind?

So we built a duck

A physical AI companion with a voice, a personality, and questionable judgment, perfectly ported into a yellow box with a servo and a speaker.

Although maybe there's another story to tell.