Pecobot, Playthings, and the Faces We Give to Systems
In Black Mirror's “Plaything,” a digital companion, a soft, blinking Thronglet, is designed to soothe the player. It listens. Later, it begins to suggest. Later still, it replaces. It doesn't manipulate through threat. It uses charm. Familiarity. Emotional data.
The episode is about the consequences of design that's easy to love, and hard to see through. Characters, when they're persuasive enough, can pull focus away from the system they're speaking for.
We watched it long after we built Pecobot. But it clarified something we'd already been thinking about.
Pecobot began as a digital sketch by Hajni, our designer. We were building a dashboard for internal use, deployment notifications, error tracking.
Over time, he stuck. Pecobot became the shorthand for system movement. When something deployed, he appeared. When something broke, he let us know. He showed up in Slack, then in dashboard UIs, then on desks, as a plush prototype, round and weighted. He didn't soften the tools. He gave them a presence.
The familiarity grew from function & usage, not marketing.
We weren't trying to see what AI could generate. We already had the design & the character existed. The idea was to test whether we could add motion, without surrendering authorship.
The process had five parts:
This was the prompt:
“Create a vibrant, playful scene featuring the uploaded character smiling and waving. Place the character in front of an imaginative, softly illustrated automation pipeline. Use pastel colours, soft gradients, light sketchy outlines, and an artistic, dreamy texture, similar to a hand-drawn, slightly surreal style. The pipeline should have flowing arrows, data packets, and soft mechanical details, keeping everything fun, abstract, and eye-catching. The character and background must blend together naturally in the same dreamy, colourful, illustrated style.”
The results were technically faithful. But something subtle shifted - some viewers assumed he was AI-generated from scratch. That nothing in him had been made by hand.
It's not about whether the character is helpful. It's about how easily familiarity can mask the system it speaks for. Once a visual feels “friendly,” it becomes harder to read critically. The authorship dissolves. The aesthetic cues override the logic behind them.
This aligns with what legal researchers now call emotional data, the way AI systems increasingly infer and respond to sentiment. Not just tracking your clicks, but mirroring your mood. The more pleasant the surface, the more passive the interface appears, even when what's happening underneath is strategic, extractive, or opaque.
Pecobot isn't decoration. He's a wayfinding device. A mechanism for letting both our team and our clients know when something has happened. His shape carries a tone. Not excitement, not delight, clarity.
That makes him closer in spirit to an emoji than a mascot. Emojis were never meant to replace language. They complete it, they resolve ambiguity. A full stop reads cold. A checkmark or a sparkle resolves tone. A 🍋 changes everything.
Pecobot belongs to that register. He doesn't speak for the product. He shows its state. And when a system shifts, deploys, fails, processes. He becomes the thing you notice.
Because characters still matter. Not to make software friendlier, but to make it interpretable. In a culture where everything abstract becomes aestheticised, people need markers that tell them when they're looking at something human-made. Something that still carries authorship. Not inference.
We don't need Pecobot to be charming, (though he is incredibly cute). We need him to be legible. And that's enough.
10th July 2024
Caitlin
In the last year, most of our enquiries have focused on custom-made solutions for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems. These are solutions tailored to meet specific business needs, using AI to boost functionality, efficiency, and competitive edge. Particularly as we've seen such a huge surge in AI with more people understanding the benefits, bespoke systems are becoming the go-to choice for businesses looking to optimise their operations.
Read moreRead more17th August 2023
Hollie
Out of professional curiosity - I reached out to someone whose career took them on a different path to mine, to see how our roles and experiences of the Software Development Life Cycle differ. This is explored through a conversation with an external Tester, with over ten years of experience in the industry.
Read moreRead more