The Federal Government has formally proposed the following distraction guidelines:

• “Reduce complexity and task length required by the device;”
• “Limit device operation to one hand only (leaving the other hand to remain on the steering wheel to control the vehicle);”
• “Limit individual off-road glances required for device operation to no more than two seconds in duration;”
• “Limit unnecessary visual information in the driver’s field of view;”
• “Limit the amount of manual inputs required for device operation.”

Also, unless your car is in park, the following features would turn off:

• “Visual-manual text messaging;”
• “Visual-manual internet browsing;”
• “Visual-manual social media browsing;”
• “Visual-manual navigation system destination entry by address;”
• “Visual-manual 10-digit phone dialing;”
• “Displaying to the driver more than 30 characters of text unrelated to the driving task.”

These seem like reasonable guidelines. The question is, how will they be followed, in light of the fact that the driving experience is becoming increasingly tech-infused?

Mary Chan, formerly of Dell, currently heads up the GM Global Connected Consumer Division, where she reports: “We’re building a GM-curated app store… We think of the vehicle as a connected device. We think of it as a smartphone on wheels.”

So, but if smartphones make drivers distracted, especially in situations where a driver needs to look at his phone screen while driving, and we’ve got all these new governmentally dictated recommendations for limiting in-car distraction agents, why the hell are manufacturers making the entire inside of my car a giant smartphone screen? Who thought it would be cool to send drivers forth, all fast and furious across the football fields of the world, blind?

I love my smartphone. I’ve come to rely on it, not only to communicate, but also to find my way around, figure out a good place for lunch or a side-route around horrible grid-lock. In fact, I use my smartphone so much, that yeah, I might be somewhat addicted to it, but we’re not going to talk about that right now. My (possible) smartphone addiction notwithstanding, one thing is absolutely certain. It’s dangerous to look down at your phone screen while driving, you know, because of the whole driving the length of a football field with your eyes closed scenario I mentioned earlier, yet, the entire interior of my car is becoming one gigantic smartphone… How could that be a good plan? I think about how much more dangerous in-car touch screen technology makes driving, and suddenly, I’m feeling a bit paranoid, clammy even, like is everybody on board with this, or is it that maybe the mob wants me dead?

The truth is, however, it’s often necessary to use our smartphones in the car. I really do appreciate and rely on lots of those apps. Mary Chan is on the right track with the in-car app curation idea. Having the data those apps provide infused into my car’s dashboard sounds wonderful, but taking one’s eyes off the road while driving, should be the very last thing in-car app design encourages. We need to re-think a better delivery method for in-car technology, and removing all the previously employed, highly functional tactile interface mechanisms our cars used to have and converting to a screen-based interface is not the solution!

The tasks that drive us to our smartphones (texting, maps, entertainment, etc.) are not going away, BUT encouraging drivers to take their eyes off the road should. What’s crucial at this point is that we roll back a few meters and properly consider what kind of technology we need for optimal in-car app curation. We want enhanced functionality and optimal safety, aka EYES FREE technology. Let’s explore the possibilities.

Here’s what I want you to do… Right now, i want you to close your eyes, reach into your bag and find a pen. If you don’t have a bag, find one on your desk or whatever. Can you find the pen without looking into the bag? Of course you can. I personally carry a big ole black hole of a purse. In a moment’s notice I can pull out any number of important tools by touch alone. I can even do it while walking, or better yet, while driving.

Good car design is meant to capitalize on our sense of touch. I can shift the car without looking. I can control the gas and the brake without looking. I steer the car without looking at the steering wheel. I can control the wipers and turn-signals AND figure out which lever is which, all without looking. All I need to know is the location of the various knobs, switches and pedals. In fact, all the major functions of the car are accomplished entirely through proprioception and tactile sense. For these tasks, we recognize the importance of bodily interactions. We need to build technology for the auxiliary in-car features that work in the same way. Tactile / haptic technology “has been described as “doing for the sense of touch what computer graphics does for vision.”’ Once you think about in-car app curation in terms of everything we already know about good car design, it seems obvious… (at least to us) that because tactile interfaces don’t require a driver to take his eyes off the road, they have excellent potential for car app development.

Early cars had beautiful tactile interface that allowed drivers to have control over elements through sense of touch, leaving the eyes free to focus on the road.

As a car junky from Detroit, I am in love with early model American cars, and have an especially abiding passion for all things Muscle. During my tenure at Cadillac, I got to spend lots of time at the private Cadillac Museum, which featured every significant model/year, including the very first. Not only did I get to look at these beautiful cars from the outside, I got to sit inside and manipulate the dashboard’s buttons and knobs. There’s something immensely satisfying about the interior of the Caddys from the 1940s-50s. Their control panels were based on the cockpits of WWII fighter jets (a place where it was forbidden to use strictly visual controls). In these older Cadillacs, everything could be done without looking (if you could reach that far — these cars were wide!).

The mechanical nature of the buttons, knobs and levers provided resistance with satisfying clicks so you could feel the selection points. You could tell, for example, every time you passed a detent along the climate control lever, or even flip the radio dial through its paces. All mechanisms were actuated by touch alone and Eyes Free.

At Kicker, we focus on Natural User Interface, which has deep roots in industrial design. It’s all about how to design a device or machine that interacts well with the human body. When you drive a car, you really are an extension of the machine itself. That’s what’s so exhilarating about driving. (Did I mention how much I love Muscle cars?) As we continue to design technology for the inside of our cars, we’ll want to create interfaces that function with no chrome and engage the body in a way that doesn’t disrupt keeping our eyes on the road.

The Disney Research Project and the MIT Media Lab’s object mapping research project are two great examples of how touch can be used to control technology by mapping software functionality onto tangible objects. These sense technologies not only recognize touch but are able to understand many different configurations of the human hand. Everyday objects, like the knobs and levers on a car dashboard can be taught to recognize touch and gesture. Also, these features can be made infinitely changeable and mappable, allowing for their evolution via redesign. Imagine what you could do while driving perfectly safely if you could feel your way to a particular outcome instead of having to rely on vision. What if, for example, you could control your music library by spinning a dial (how novel!) rather than looking at a little screen, or request directions by pressing a button. How about reliably editing spoken emails or text messages by engaging just a few basic tactile touchpoints? All without looking at a screen AND on the same simple tactile knob. Since this object mapping sensory technology is already available, tangible surfaces could have infinite digital maps that adjust and change based on what the user is trying to do. Now that’s good in-car app curation!

By mapping functions and sensations onto physical surfaces we can take advantage of the already highly functional Eyes Free in-car mode of operations, bringing all our smartphone power into the car, without endangering our lives by forcing us to interact with a screen, while driving. No blind driving for us, thank you very much!

At Kicker, we’re driven by the desire to innovate… with our eyes on the road.

References:
http://www.distraction.gov/content/get-the-facts/facts-and-statistics.html

http://www.dot.gov/briefing-room/us-department-transportation-proposes-%E2%80%98distraction%E2%80%99-guidelines-automakers

http://www.fastcompany.com/3007085/innovation-agents/why-your-car-now-giant-smartphone-wheels

http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/touche-touch-and-gesture-sensing-for-the-real-world/

http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/29/eyes-on-mit-media-labs-smarter-objects/

Photos courtesy of myoldpostcards on flickr 

Written by Jody Medich & Wendy Rolon.

At Kicker we realize how important it is to combine our creative ideals with a functional business model. Let’s talk about the nature of both creativity and business, as we see it, and then discuss the Kicker methodology for combining the two for optimal success.

Creativity is enchanting. We humans are drawn to it the way we’re attracted to fire or to kittens. For those of us with a penchant for making things, the process of creating often feels like folding fragile origami creatures whilst flailing around inside a brooding summer hurricane. It’s a dynamic process that takes hold of us, and if we’re lucky, trounces us over a wave of transcendence, eventually. The process entails much beautiful struggle and ultimately, surrender, as we crawl out from the melee, drenched and grateful, like a newborn dragon. As you can imagine, this whole inspired and torturous affair is not something one can perform on cue. That’s just not how the muse works. The Muse of Creativity is effervescent, temperamental and sly. You have to take her out on dates. Spend hours connecting with her, listening to her stories. You have to present her with gifts. Take her on drives. Dream with her.

So then there’s the business of Business, the contracts, meetings, piles of documents, emails, spreadsheets and power calls that are inevitably necessary if you want to run a company. It’s all pretty standard stuff, with well-established protocols for success, that is, if you’re running a bank. The trouble comes when you try to ruin a creative company as if it was a bank. Sorry, I meant to say “run” a creative company, not “ruin” but well, anyway… Banks are linear places, where 1+1 = 2 or you’ve got a problem. In a creative company where 1+1 = 2, you end up churning out cookie cutter “creativity” that relies on the same solutions every time (read: bad design). Many design companies fall into this trap: we work with business, we need to adapt creativity to the business process. These companies have very set document templates for expressing design to clients. The problem is that this reduces ideas down to a formula of filling in the blanks. Following the same formula every time gets you similar results every time. While that may be familiar and safe, it’s certainly not tantamount to innovation.  

Or maybe you fall prey to the work harder, work faster illusion, where you think that if you force yourself to just do it, the end result will be better. Any creative person knows that this mindset of forcing it fails. If you push too hard toward getting things done, the whole thing seizes up. That combination of creativity, deadlines and formulaic pressure unique to design, attracts adrenaline junkies who, ironically, waste time spinning their wheels in the rut of an uninspired process whose outcome, like Project Runway, is quickly reduced to mind-numbing noise. In that set-up, there is no time for exploration and designers instead rely on instinct and a toolbox of tricks to push something out the door.

Unfortunately, you can’t just wield creativity. It’s a relationship, and like most significant, worthwhile relationships, it ends up being a marathon, not a sprint. The amazing thing about creativity is that 1+1 > 2, meaning creativity is bigger than we are, and doesn’t care about linear confines. This is why artists live the way we do: wandering, exploring, making, and then sharing our art with anyone who cares to listen. The Creative Muse can’t always be scheduled to show up for business meetings when you need her, or relied upon to take lunch with the rest of the team. You have to yield to her, the way a flower bends toward the sun. If you can run your company so there’s time and space to bask in the sunshine of The Creative Muse, she’ll shine her magic on your work. At a creative company, this magic is at the center of everything. Without this creative magic happening, the company has no reason to exist, so all the contracts and emails and production meetings may as well leap into a black (and white) hole.

So like we were saying, it seems that creativity and the standard business model just don’t mix very well, but here’s the thing… they must find a way. Flying to Neverland is amazing, but no company can run on fairy dust alone. Design is a business, after all. Clients are ultimately paying for ideas they can use, not just pretty daydreams, but concepts and products of utility. Employees need to be paid, deadlines need to be met, the outside world demands attention. All successful designers must find a way to collaborate with the gods of 9-5. Without some of the imposed structure these business gods provide, your company will eventually end up crashing down around you, like that house in the Buster Keaton movie.

Creative teams want very much to do creative work, the question is how do we build a good, strong house that will support our creative collaboration without it falling down around us? At Kicker we’ve tried various strategies and over time we’ve learned how to keep our creative team bobbing and weaving, smiling and producing, with integrity while giving clients exactly what they ask for: great, innovative design that will grab attention in the marketplace.

Support with Sea Legs

At Kicker, our main goal is innovation. We don’t walk backwards, which is what happens when you design based on precedent. This forward-thinking approach requires a business model that puts creativity at the heart of it all. As designers, artists and thinkers, we don’t need a support team that’s constantly shutting us down. We need support that fosters and protects creativity. This is where the sea legs come in. Instead of a business model where the spreadsheet spreader’s fundamental function is to tow the line, and tell the crazy artists “no”, we have a team that takes the journey together. It’s crucial to have business support that gives the team the ability to meet challenge head on, with new eyes and a fearless, optimistic mind. Our support team, like our design team, thrives on real-time problem solving. They are the translators between business and creativity.

Time is Fluid, So Pay Attention

We have an artisan approach to design and that’s evident in our process. We make time to experiment and stare off into space because that is what creativity requires. Sometimes you have to go away from the work and foster new stories to share. Then, suddenly a brilliant idea seizes you, and you have to make it right now! The time-is-fluid concept runs completely contrary to the work-faster-work-harder idea. When you allow your team the time (and space) to ruminate, fertilize and germinate, you end up with many more great ideas to work with. Once you’ve got a bunch of inspired ideas, you can iterate on them pretty quickly. There are phases in the design process: the dream phase, the build phase, the refinement phase, and time behaves differently in each of these phases. If you trust and pay attention to how time works distinctly in each phase, you can nurture each specific part of the process properly.

Reasonable and Consistent Backdrop to the Chaos

We compliment our artisan approach with a reasonable and consistent support system. We build production schedules so that Tuesday, Thursday and the weekends are focused on getting stuff done – the actual making. This time is not spent in justification or meetings, it’s spent lost in the dream of the creative process. it’s messy, and chaotic, sometimes ugly. This is the absolutely necessary aspect of the work that’s often perceived of as scary by business types. We know we’re not the first to honor the creative process by taking this approach. Google Prototyping X, for example, has inspired us by developing great tech in this exact way. But, we’re not trying to scare anybody, so we have focus-days also, which creates a balance. Monday, and Wednesday and sometimes on Friday we focus on meetings, logistics and all that’s necessary to run a company. We distill our work’s progress down into understandable and actionable documents, presentations, and meetings, because that’s what business requires.

Allow for Solutions to Evolve

Finally, we’re brave in our communication with each other. No need to cling to a potentially out-moded piece of the puzzle. If something feels off, we speak up and work through it. We allow for our practices to evolve, both over time and sometimes in relationship to a particular project. It’s important not to get too bogged down in notions of how things typically work, and instead to stay open to each new project as it unfolds. Some of the best business and design is the result of having the brains and the chutzpah to wildly improvise, so we’re mindful about creating a culture that fosters new ideas and laughs at fear.

Nanu Nanu…

Written by: Jody Medich & Wendy Rolon

Do you guys have a bunch of trumpets handy? Great, because Kicker’s bursting with jubilation! (Ok, here’s where you should start trumpeting.) Please welcome our very own Jody Medich to the position of CEO. We’ve been under her creative leadership for several years, but now she’ll be positively at the helm. Keep an eye out for her mighty super powers to launch Kicker ever deeper into the creative oceans of artisan design, NUI, and R&D.

Jennifer Bove, our former Managing Director has stepped down and relocated to New York to join forces with GE, which will allow her to be closer to family and grow her own. She has just a couple more weeks till the due date of her first child! Jennifer will continue to act as an advisor to Kicker for the foreseeable future or until we stop pinging her with questions, which will basically be never, because she’s awesome.

Speaking of awesome, we’ve got some talented new Kickers to celebrate this Spring. Tej Datta has joined the team as our ever so sophisticated Client Relations Manager, Wendy Rolón is our smart & sassy Writer, Susan George has been enlisted as our Outstanding Operations Manager, and Jen Colasuonno is diving into the deep end as our Heroic Project Manager.

Julie McPherson, our studio manager has moved on and will soon be embracing the wonderful world of motherhood. Good luck Julie! We’ll miss you.

As if all this amazingness wasn’t enough, well there’s more. Kicker has a new office. It’s on Townsend, in a gorgeous building full of exposed brick and ceiling beams, and the whole place is just seething with genius. You can practically hear the walls crackling with the electricity of new and amazing ideas all around. We love it. Come kick it with us: 350 Townsend Street, Suite 409A.

On the project germination front, we’re working on some exceptionally interesting stuff at the studio right now, like a text input device for Google Glass, the creation of a new tablet interface, and using everything from emotion detection to gesture-based technology.

By now we know you’re just swooning from all the excitement and we don’t blame you. Take deep breaths; it will help you absorb all this greatness we’re dishing out. Oh, and there’s one more thing you should do. Go visit the Kicker website. It’s all re-designed and gorgeous and better than ever.

Kicker 3.0 is looking forward to another incredible year.

What we find even more interesting, is that for many of us, it’s actually easier to think deeply and stay focused when we have something to do with our hands, meaning that fidgeting helps us grapple with and process information. Sure, tapping your foot helps blow off some steam, but even better, it helps engage your thinking process by increasing your levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, two neurotransmitters that sharpen concentration. In other words, you actually think with your body. “Ago ergo cogito” – I act, therefore I think, meaning we’ve known about this body thinking stuff for so long that I can quote to you about it in a dead language, so let’s use this fact to our advantage, yes?

There are a number of studies which prove that via embodied cognition, engaging the body helps the brain to process information. In one such study, researchers focused on kids learning math. In the past, students were given a multiplication table and told to memorize it. Today, more and more, kids are taught to use their fingers while learning math. In doing so, teachers find their students are far more likely to retain what they learn, not only because an embodied instructional method gives them a way to visualize the abstract, but also because the act of manipulating their fingers while conceptualizing new information encourages a deeper, more “full-bodied” understanding of the material.

As you know, at Kicker we’re all about designing devices that celebrate and harness our body’s already fantastic functionality, so we want to capitalize on our natural inclination toward fidgeting, both to help you focus like a ninja, and also to continue our righteous campaign, providing alternatives to screen/keyboard interaction via the principles of embodied cognition. There are some innovations happening currently, that are moving technology in what we think is an exciting direction. All kinds of small, useful, and wearable devices are popping up, like the Nike Fuelband and the Misfit Shine, which are physical activity tracking devices. Using a simple, glanceable UI that lives on your wrist, they provide sensor data about your movement through the world whilst capitalizing on your inherent need to fidget, and anyone will tell you that a good watch-inspired fidget is impossible to resist. The Fuelband and Shine are off to a good start.

Another bunch of wearables that are popping up are the phone watches like the Metawatch Frame. In terms UI, these wearable devices are basically no different than cell phones, only they’re mounted to your wrist and smushed down into a tiny screen. A similar evolution from pocket watch to wrist watch, the big idea being it’s simpler to glance at your watch than it is to pull out your phone to use its apps. We applaud the idea of seamless glancing at a device that’s always at the ready, but unfortunately, it’s not so pleasant to run apps at 1/8 size. Unlike a pocket watch, a smartphone is a computer, and has a multiplicity of capabilities beyond telling me the time. I expect my smartwatch to be smart, (read: not annoying to use) or I’ll stick with the original “dumb” one.

Various flaws notwithstanding, these new devices are encouraging, however, they all still rely on a visual UI. Sometimes, in order to think at maximum throttle, your gaze needs to be drifting elsewhere: driving, walking, listening to a lecture, sitting in a meeting, whizzing by trees on a train. In these instances our wandering eye is actually helping us to focus by shutting out extraneous input, much in the same way white noise would, which is tantamount to a sort of audio fidgeting.

I know how it is when you’re dreaming up big ideas. I notice your fidgeting. Sometimes you’re staring into a dust mote while flipping your pencil around and around. Sometimes you’re rubbing your forehead. Sometimes you bite your nails. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat through a lecture, distracted by the click click clicking of your pen, or the bobbing up and down of your foot, which moves in asynchronous time with the speaker’s voice. These variously employed fidgets are satisfying precisely because they provide a rhythm and a pathway to concentration. They block out mental noise and free up the senses for maximal sensory uptake, providing you with the cognitive expansion and momentum to focus your thinking optimally, allowing you to process information with all your senses.

At Kicker, we’re into designing products that enhance the thinking process, make us smarter, quicker, more dimensionally intelligent. We want to design products that are not only novel in the way they’re worn, but also groundbreaking in terms of what they’re capable of doing, and how easily they’re able to get it done. It’s not enough to take an existing technology and call it new just because you’ve strapped it to my head. No sir, not hardly. What we need is the type of technology that seamlessly and elegantly, gives the wearer dynamic control of her environment, by taking advantage of the body’s natural rhythms and propensities, without such reliance on visual UI. That’s what we’re working on here at Kicker.

What if you could control your music playlist with a leg flex? Or how about if shaking a pen during a discussion could tag important content for later? What if pacing at the front of the room would automatically start your presentation? There are countless examples of how technology, working with our physical tendencies and taking advantage of how human bodies function naturally in the real world, can actually make us humans more super-powered.

We like superheroes. We want to be more like those guys and yes, we already purchased the spandex tights, but beyond that, let’s say we re-think technology to create interfaces that maximize our powers, by working seamlessly with the behaviors, like fidgeting, that we’re inclined to do naturally.

Written by Jody Medich & Wendy Rolon

Kicker Studio, a small boutique design company specializing in digital and physical interfaces, is looking for a Studio/Personal Assistant to join our team.

Job responsibilities:
-Serve as the front face of Kicker Studio
-Facilitate inter-office communications
-Answer phone, check & distribute messages
-Check & distribute physical mail
-Communicate via email & filter CEO emails
-Liaise with all outside vendors
-Maintain calendar, send reminders, arrange travel
-Keep studio stocked and tidy 
-Keep files up to date
-Research as needed
-Run errands
-Administer studio systems (Harvest, Dropbox and Google Apps for Business)
-Perform other duties as necessary

Qualifications:
- Pro-active
- Flexible
- Organized
- Strong communication skills
- Web savvy
- Proposal or blog writing skills or design skills are a plus

This is a part time position: 20-30 hr/wk, Mon & Wed hours are required in the SF office (sometimes Friday in office). Minimal tasks Tues & Thurs. 

Salary commensurate with experience. Medical benefits eligibility after probationary period.

Please email cover letter and resume to: jobs@kickerstudio.com

The reason I can’t have a bubble on BART is because the experience relies on my eyes focusing on a screen, which is not possible for me without the potential of introducing puke into the situation. What it comes down to is this: Some activities, like riding a bus or driving a car or crossing the street or a whole host of James Bond type of eventualities are just not compatible with looking at screens. At Kicker, we understand this, so we’re working on alternatives that can help people work easily and more efficiently in lots of different scenarios, with the goal of making them (meaning you!) more like Iron Man than one of those lesser superheroes whose main superpower involves staring at screens… wait a minute, there IS no superhero like that, is there? Yeah… exactly.

We’re working on a couple of different wearable devices, and more and more, we’re understanding the importance of eyes-free interactions. The more mobile we are, the more important it is to be able to interact with technology through our other senses, not just me, with my merciless motion-sickness, but all of us who want to unlock our superhero potential. For example, we can prevent people walking into oncoming traffic or falling off cliffs while texting, or crashing their cars while reading emails, if we provide them with technology that relies on verbal and tactile interfaces instead of a screen.

Studies show that people are very well versed at multi-tasking while listening to things, but not so much while looking at things. People who are heads down, reading their screens are immersed in a way that prevents multi-tasking, and since there’s no way we can avoid multi-tasking in this crazy beautiful world, we need to make it easier to do well.

So we’re spending some time contemplating the significance and potential impact of eyes–free technology, and audio is a big part of that, however, we feel that ultimately, strictly audio interface is less than ideal. For example, it’s difficult to edit text using an audio interface, and also, there are many situations where speaking out loud is just not practical. Voice interface is great in certain situations, but not ideal on a bus or any other time you want privacy. I don’t need everyone around me to know that I want to listen to Agatha Christie’s book on tape (not that I do, I was speaking hypothetically just now…)

What some devices do, is confirm a user’s voice commands with text that appears on the screen as the device hears it, so the user can quickly look to see what the device heard, and what it’s planning to do with the command. This is ok, but sometimes lands us in a situation where we’re cursing Siri to hell and back- I know, there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in that… huh? I mean, poor thing! …she’s only trying her best.

But wait… We do have other senses besides vision and hearing, correct? Well at Kicker, we’ve been exploring ways to innovate beyond current audio/visual offerings, and we’ve discovered that there’s another, niftier approach we like even better than cursing Siri…

Tactile interface combined with adequate spatial mapping of tasks can provide an effective non-visual method to navigate. As a woman, I often carry a purse, aka the black hole. To find something, I don’t open it and look inside, instead I stick my hand in, feel around and magically pull out what I want through a combination of touch, sound, and spatially relevant pockets and pouches. The thought process is something like this: that’s jangly — must be keys; that’s smooth and long — must be pens; then there’s the sparkle pouch vs. the vinyl pouch for telling the difference between lipstick and aspirin; my phone is in the front pocket vs. the inside ID pocket.

Now, imagine if you could feel the difference between Wolfmother and Britney Spears on the device in your pocket. You would never have to exclaim to your music player and an entire busload of innocent people, that you (actually) want to listen to Britney Spears, but because you suffer from motion sickness, can’t secretly communicate this (sick) desire to your device, via screen, without barfing. See? You’d get the music you want, without barf on the seats, and your dignity would remain intact. I feel so much better already.

Anyway, what all this means is that we’re working on designing a device that can be controlled by touch AND audio, in combination, with the ability to switch back and forth, depending on the specific situation, and also, another device that utilizes tactile interface and spatial mapping, because sometimes you’re gonna need that. Sound good? Of course it does.

We’ll keep you updated as we finalize the results of these concepts. We are currently in the prototyping stages and look forward to sharing the details with you soon.

Dogs understand, communicate and serve like any good robot should. By observing my dog, I came to appreciate how to design interfaces that could properly communicate with people. Dog is man’s best friend, right? That’s because they listen to us and respond appropriately, especially when we’re feeling stressed, down, or otherwise screwed up… hell, they corroborate our very existence with their penetrating eye contact and tail wagging. Here’s a bit about my dog.

• Expresses empathy: He has eyebrows. This is important. He is able to mimic my mood and let me feel as if he understands my emotional state. When I’m happy and excited, he jumps around, happy and excited. When I’m sad, his face mimics mine and he tries his best to cuddle up next to me and give me a bunch of dog kisses. When I’m mad at him, he shows he’s sorry and listens very closely to my instructions. When I’m scared, he jumps to attention and barks at anything that moves. He understands my emotions and responds with empathy to me.

• Pays attention to context: When I start getting dressed, my dog gets upset. He knows this means I’m heading to work, and right away, he starts pleading his case to come along with me. He reads my steps to getting ready to leave the house as an indication of my intentions, and works to let me know he understands what’s happening. However, if I do these steps individually, at other times of the day, or not at all, my dog does not run around the house dramatically, letting me know he’s extremely interested in accompanying me somewhere. He understands the context of my actions, and emphatically, (hysterically?) communicates possible functions in that context. If I’m outside and something scares me, he stays by my side and barks like crazy, but he doesn’t do that if we just go outside. He infers what his behavior should be based on what is happening around him… around us.

• Reads my gestures even better than my words: And he does the best when I use voice with gesture. I can communicate with my dog without making a sound, and with simple gestures. The more I repeat them, the more he learns what I mean when I do them. He lets me know he understands by watching my gestures with his eyes, and then carrying out my request.

• Productive feedback: Also really important, is that if he doesn’t understand, he communicates this, by tilting his head in a questioning manner. It’s just as important that he communicates when he doesn’t understand as when he does. Otherwise, it’s just frustrating. He’s honest. He doesn’t try to bullshit me by pretending he understands while he’s really just running on some incredibly irrelevant script, no way! He’s the real deal. He feels me.

So see? My dog and I have a quite the functional relationship happening. Clearly, my dog’s got my back. He aims to please. We’ve got it goin’ on. We understand one another. Well, what if I could train my devices to learn my commands, gestures and feeling states? What if my devices and I could get along as well as my dog and I?

It turns out, that we can actually do this now with technology. We can design technology that responds just the way a dog does.

Check this out:

• Voice Technology: Emotion detection (or affective computing) technology exists. Acknowledging a user’s emotional state will vastly improve his or her functioning, according to various studies about automotive safety and voice emotion recognition. Smile/frown recognition is already an available feature on many devices made by companies like Samsung and Microsoft. If I’m angry, put a little empathy in the voice (not too much — because that’s annoying), just a little cream and sugar. It might actually stop me from spiking my phone on the pavement.
• Context: The Google interface does a good job of recognizing my most relevant data, based on my calendar and emails. It infers what information I will most likely need in any given moment. Furthering this context-based inference making ability will mean the creation of interfaces that recognize our patterns/needs and offer productive feedback, in the form of applicable options/solutions that feel authentically helpful instead of disconnected and, well… infuriating.
• Gesture: There are any number of gesture recognition products on the market. The majority are used for novelty, like in immersive video games, but they’re increasingly being used for function. Here are just a few cool examples: The lift-gate on the Ford C-Max Minivan uses gesture technology to provide a hands-free experience. It “sees” that I have my arms full and opens the lift-gate automatically. Gesture tech is also currently being used to assist stroke victims via robot – patient rehabilitation, and there’s even gesture recognition software that can transcribe sign language symbols into text.

In Conclusion…
My dog is an amazing companion. We spend lots of time together, and our interactions have revolutionized my idea of what’s possible in terms of personal devices, especially regarding how they can better serve me, with enhanced context awareness, gesture recognition and productive feedback, which is great because I probably spend about as much time with my devices as I do with my dog. Jeez… did I just say that? Well, yeah I did, and if that means we live in a world that relies too much on devices… well, I’m not even going there, except to say that I want my devices to be devoted to my happiness, just like my dog. That’s the mission… at Kicker we’re all about providing that extra kick that’ll make the world a happier place.

Written by Jody Medich and Wendy Rolon

You can read the original blog post here, but more important, here’s our excellent rebuttal in defense of NUI design. Get it right, people!

What a great opportunity to start a meaningful dialog about what’s most important and relevent in the NUI movement. Many valid points are made here, in particular, the importance of putting culture in the foreground and designing understandable devices, but I also feel that this post perhaps overly focuses on the semantics of words like “invisible” and “disappear”, which seems to have led to the dwelling on what I feel are ultimately some less salient points.

In my opinion, invisible UI is not the same as No UI or even dumbed-down UI. At Kicker, we use this term (and it’s just a term) to describe what happens to UI that’s rooted in embodied cognition. We believe that the design community has gone just about as far as it can go with the chrome-based approach, and it’s time to back up a few steps for the purpose of envisioning a more dynamic model. Think about how devices were built in the past. Machines were built to work with the operator’s body.

At Kicker, we design not to make frustrating, unsuable, sterile interfaces, but to do the exact opposite. We believe that “objects designed for controlling physical matter are designed to relate to, and interact, with the human body.“ When we talk about invisible design, we’re talking about the notion that pops up at the very end of this blog post… that design should receed into the background because it’s so easy to understand. For more info on Kicker’s brand of NUI, read this.

In these moments, when I’m losing my shit, technology needs to talk calmly and clearly. Instead, it blithely repeats every irrelevant option it always offers, which makes as much sense as these ridiculous Americans who speak English in a really loud voice to foreigners, thinking that if they just yell, they’ll be understood… but at least you can smack those people. Technology you can’t even smack without wasting a lot of money because now you’ve gone and broken the damn thing.

When someone is stressed, they lose their ability to focus and understand what is happening around them. In these moments, the sympathetic nervous system kicks in and the brain goes myopic on us, shutting out choices and scrambling all sensory input, except for the info you need for survival. Blood boils, eyes pop out of heads, breathing gets shallow and in the mind’s eye, a team of guys in track suits start jumping up and down, screaming “Run! Run for your lives!”

Technology could care less about us humans and our stressed out lives. This is made all the more infuriating when it’s an NUI technology – which is designed so that we can relate to it the way we do living things. Here, the betrayal is twice as bad, because NUI technology should know better, for god’s sake. Voice, is a great example because it sort of sounds cognizant, suggests embodiment, and reminds us of ourselves, therefore, it’s that much more egregious of a crime when voice technology fails us utterly, kicks us in the nuts when we’re already down, and doesn’t even realize it’s doing anything wrong.

Humans respond to a person in stress empathetically. If someone is frantically asking us for help, we try to calm them and we ask them simple questions. But voice interface is not like that. At all. Turns out, voice interface is like the Honey Badger.

Personally, I’ve been excited about voice interface for a long time. I get very bad motion sickness and can’t use technology in any moving vehicle, not even if I’m a passenger. Looking down causes me to be immediately ill. So I was really rooting for my new voice interface on my fancy new Android phone.

The other day, I was trying to pick up a friend of mine at the airport. Traffic was crazy on the freeway and I needed to let her know I would be there a few minutes later than we’d planned. I can’t text and drive, so I decided to use my voice interface. I double pressed the button to wake up the voice and I said “Text Nora I’m on my way”. I waited a long time. Nothing happened. I looked down and saw the words “Network Error”.

I did a bit of deep breathing, crossed my fingers and repeated the process again. This time the voice heard me, but couldn’t find the contact. Nora is a frequently used contact, so this made no sense. I asked again. Again, it insisted that there was no Nora in the contacts. It even spelled Nora correctly when it informed me of this. My grip on the steering wheel tightened. Ok, so now you’re just f**king with me, right? I pulled over, found the contact by hand, and used the voice feature again, to send a text, and it worked. Ok. Fine. Voice interface had some flaws, but, once I found the contact info manually, thereby giving it visual parameters, it worked, basically… sort of.

Much later, I was driving back from a client meeting and had some ideas I really wanted to get down. For years, I’ve desperately wanted a voice-to-text service that I could use in the car. I typically get ideas while driving and have always wished I could just voice-text them to myself. So here we go! I activated the voice interface and said “record voice note”. This is what happened: For about 45 minutes, every time I woke up the voice interface, it would ask me “Who would you like to message?”. I could not get it to cancel. I could not get it to change the topic. It ignored requests for help, that useless scum. In fact, that incorrigible shit ignored every attempt I made to get out of that mode, and who even knows what “that mode” was?! I even restarted the phone. I was crawling in traffic fantasizing about murder.

At the end of this exchange, I was in tears. Frustrated tears, staving off road rage, and stuck next to a police officer — so no looking down – Jesus, I really needed to take down the notes, and at this point, I cannot for the life of me remember what revelatory information I wanted so badly to record. Instead, I came home and wrote this post.

So yeah, my voice interface and I are still in a fight. I mean, imagine the scenario I just described as a conversation with someone sitting with you in the car. That idiot would’ve gotten a swift kick in the ass and been jettisoned to the curb. Game over. You think you’re funny, stupid voice? Well hahaha. Looks like you’ll be walking home, buddy.

So like I said, I hate technology, and here’s the challenge. How about we design voice technology that actually works the way a conversation does? How about voice technology that would be responsive not only to my words, but my tone and the context of our conversation, as well, the same way a person would?

Studies have shown that when people interact with a non-empathetic voice interface while driving, especially if they’re in a heightened emotional state of either happiness or distress, they’re 2xs as likely to crash their car. This is just awful. We might as well just be texting while driving!

However, the good new is, that emotion detection technology actually exists, and it’s quite good at detecting emotion at either end of the happy – upset continuum. Google is proving that it’s possible to design emotion and context sensitive voice technology, based on their research which shows that humans really do behave within fairly reliable patterns. This makes it possible for voice technology to provide relevant data to the user when he or she is most likely to want it. Adding this type of predictive/contextual analysis to voice interface will make it using it way more worthwhile. 

What’s more, we can train this same voice technology to respond to our specific tone and cues, making it customizable by user. We can now say to our devices, “Learn my language.” Chances are, I make the same request the same way, every time.

Learn it. Big dog did it. You can too.

Written by Jody Medich & Wendy Rolon