How I Came to be a Kicker

When Dan first suggested that we start a product design studio, I was immersed in other things. I lived in Brooklyn at the time, and had spent the past several years managing large design teams, thinking through agency-type design management problems and the business context that is building websites. Dan was working on his book Designing Interactive Gestures, and our discussions about it gave me a renewed energy and enthusiasm that I hadn’t felt in a while. I missed integrating the digital and physical realms and thinking about the body, space, and context.

I started to take the idea more seriously. While I enjoyed challenges of management and I’d learned a ton about agencies and operations, I missed doing the actual design work.  I wanted to be able to think strategically and execute on the vision, which is hard to do in a large design agency. I was ready to put my experience to work on creating a company from scratch, whose success was on us to make happen.

I also wanted to get back to more physical interaction design, working with embedded technologies to make everyday objects more desirable, responsive and adaptive to our needs.  I’d first started working with tangible interfaces in 2001, when I had the fortune to participate in interaction design experimentation at its most extravagant—the Prada Broadway Epicenter store in NYC.  Working for Prada piqued my interest in designing for services and tangible interactions, and led me to Interaction Ivrea, where I spent two years focusing on the physical (objects and environments) and on collaboration (multiple designers working together, sketching, modeling, and iterating ideas). I missed learning by making, thinking holistically, and collaborating across disciplines, always considering users and their context at the core of the design problem. To me, this is how better products are made.

Here was an opportunity to create a studio that specializes in just that … I’d just need to move to San Francisco to do it.

So last week, I did.

Why Kicker, you ask? The team. When Dan, Jody, Tom, Mike and I had our first meeting, I knew that the chemistry was right. We’re not all cut from the same cloth—far from it. But we complement each other’s strengths really well. Dan writes really cool books. Jody builds robots that destroy her art. Tom designs shoes. And Mike’s kept a refrigerator door souvenir from his last project. We each bring a different perspective to the table, whether we’re designing an object for a client, or the way our company works. I think this makes us a better design team, and allows us to design better products as a whole than we would on our own.

Together, we’re Kicker. We design products: how they look and feel, and what they do and how people interact with them. These products are intelligent: they respond to light, or sound or touch, and they are designed from the inside-out, considering the actions they need to support first, and designing their form to enable those behaviors. We do this together, with lots of learning by making, and working with real users of the products we design. This is how we think it should be done, so we do it this way.

Last week was my first official week in the office, and so far I’ve done contextual research in an office, stood under a giant video dome, talked solar energy and multi touch tablets, had about a dozen meetings, and eaten a ton of Japanese candies. It was a good week. Here’s to many more of them.

This was written by Jennifer. Posted on Tuesday, February 3, 2009, at 12:18 am. Filed under Kicker. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.