Agents, like any other cultural product, inhere meaning only to the extent that they are understood by, or represent to, the viewer or user. Thus any effective agent interface design project must be concerned with capitalising on the users' store of metaphors and associations. Agents work only because they trigger associations in the user. So agent design must include the development of highly efficient triggers for certain desired human responses. An application of semiotics is recommended.
Representations are always culturally and contextually specific.
Another curious quality of Petit Mal is that it trains the user. People readily adopt a certain gait, a certain pace, in order to illicit responses from the robot. Also unlike most computer-based machines, Petit Mal induces sociality amongst people. More recently it became possible to conceive of a technically feasible experiment in synthetic sociality. Each robot maintains its individuality, there is no distributed processing.