1. People watch.

With crowds like these, CES has no shortage of opportunities for anthropologic obeservation. I particularly enjoyed watching how people approached the new products, oriented themselves, and tried to understand what they were looking at. I listened both the questions they asked and how they picked up, examined, and played with demo models.

People loved trying out the Recon goggles with retina display

Long lines formed around the gesture-controlled dashboard concept from Mercedes Benz.

There was also plenty to see in the corridors, lounges, coffee lines, watching people use their personal technologies to navigate, catch up and recharge, often at the same time.

2. Talk to the exhibitors.

Especially at the smaller booths, I often got lucky and met the makers themselves. I asked them how and why. The excitement they have for their products, and the stories they told were both entertaining and inspiring.  It is true that not everything may be innovative, to me, at least. But CES is at its heart a trade show, and to those in their specific trade, what they’re showing is the latest and greatest for a reason.

The iBaby monitor is remote controlled by its iPad app.

There’s a person sleeping in that booth!

3. Try demos—many demos.

I picked up the products whenever possible. I put on the 3D glasses, controlled the UIs, explored the settings and options, and looked for the patterns and affordances in the designs. While  some products fell short of a “wow,” some of them were delightfully intuitive. Testing them out made my experience more playful and hands-on.

Testing out the Omek Interactive Gestural Interface.

4. Pay attention to the whimsy of it.

There’s a lot of interesting (and out there) stuff to be found if you look hard enough, especially in the smaller halls. And I sure found it. I found inspiration in the shapes, colors and materials of all manner of objects.  The robotics zone, health and fitness, and cases and accessories areas were especially good for getting caught up in the whimsy of ideas come to life.

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Soccer ball speakers

Tosy Robots, dancing to “Billie Jean”

5. Appreciate the exhibits themselves.

There is just no way around it: The Central Hall at CES is always overwhelming. I tried to break my visit to the main show floor into a few different trips, so I could take it all in.  Among the new tvs, phones, and tablets, the exhibition spaces themselves were pretty amazing. It was easy to get lost in the sea of branding but I found that sometimes the design around the products was cool if not cooler than the new products themselves.

Intel’s “Connect to Life” 3D Interactive Wall, designed by our friends at Stimulant

An actual boxing ring. On the show room floor.

As an interaction designer, the CES experience was as layered and complex as interaction design itself. It only took me 4 years to realize that I could geek out, too, just by looking at the makers, products, and designs a little differently.

When Omek approached us to create a gestural interface for Jinni, we took a step back and looked at the burgeoning landscape of gesture-based UI. And we noticed two opportunities. First, for us, the cursor-tracking metaphor most frequently found in gesture UIs poses a problem. Yes, it is easy for users to understand because it is very similar to the mouse/cursor interface but in practice, when you remove the mouse you’re removing the logical feedback loop and the unmoored action feels disjointed and clumsy. Then there’s the fact that the majority of the on-screen cues for these cursor-tracking interfaces feature large, seemingly touchable buttons while in reality the user is gesturing in free space and can’t actually touch anything. It confuses and frustrates users in a fundamental way. Tracking also requires precise hand placements and poses an issue if the interface is to be equally accessible and usable by a 5-year-old, 3’5” girl and a 38-year-old, 6’4” man. Jinni’s system is highly interactive and exploratory and it requires high maneuverability that reliance solely on cursor targets simply cannot accommodate.

Second, and perhaps, most importantly, relying entirely on tracking means the user spends a good amount of time with an arm outstretched toward the TV at shoulder’s height, which quickly becomes a strenuous posture. It is a rather awkward position to hold for any length of time, but especially in the comforts of one’s den. It feels uncomfortable, and unnatural. Most people would start looking for the remote rather than feel silly while they feel the burn.

The benefit of Omek’s gesture recognition and tracking technology is its ability to detect gestures in X, Y and Z depth, and track the full body. This means that it is possible to control an interface by making natural motions. Adding gestures to a cursor-based interface allows for more flexibility and greater access to interactive features. Gestures also feel more comfortable to users, provided they are easy to discover and remember. Rather than the monkey-arm feeling inherent in cursor tracking, instinctual gestures, like those used in normal body language, feel more natural, easy and comfortable. And isn’t that how we want to feel when sitting back watching videos?

For the Jinni browser, Omek’s technology allowed us to create a simple set of gestures that combined with the cursor-tracking needs of the interface to make them more efficient and less strenuous to users. To both coach the user through the necessary gestures and make the tracking feel more natural we designed a series of on-screen visual cues that avoid desktop/touchscreen “button” metaphors and instead rely on airy looking targets. Check it out.

Come see the demo in person at CES 2012 at the Omek booth, LVCC North Hall #3619. It will also be shown by appointment at their CES suite. TV and STB manufacturers interested in a private meeting can either schedule this at the Omek booth or send e-mail to pr@omekinteractive.com.

Understanding the Etiquette of Touch

There is a complicated and layered etiquette to touch. There are people we allow to touch us (and, by extension, our property), and people we do not. There are contexts when we want to allow someone to touch us in a specific way, and contexts when that same touch is completely inappropriate. There are different places and ways I want to be touched by the people I allow to do so. My mom and my husband, for example, have drastically different touch targets.

The location of the touch plays a large role in its meaning. Consider a pat on the back versus a pat on the arm versus a pat on the cheek. These all communicate something different. The gesture has a connotation that stands alone from our interpretation: encouraging versus consoling versus condescending. Layer on top of the gesture our perception of it and the touch source. And there are obviously different times within each touch interaction when being touched in a certain way would be, or would not be appropriate. A deep kiss in church is appropriate in a wedding ceremony but decidedly inappropriate during regular Sunday mass.

The same touch etiquette is not followed around the world. For example, in France, they kiss cheeks but in Japan, not so much. In the U.S., we need at least two feet of personal space (or more, please) while the Chinese could care less. While handshakes are becoming more universal, touch is so nuanced that even the strength of one’s grip impacts the meaning of the handshake across cultures. According to Ms. Emily Post, in the Middle East, “a too-hearty grip could be interpreted as aggressive.”

Contextualizing Touch

Touch, our first language, creates a dialogue with the world through a medium that is intimately familiar. As infants, we begin processing and exploring our world physically, with our bodies, hands, mouths. Throughout our life, that physical communication continues to be an essential need, a way of experiencing. About ninety percent of communication is nonverbal, and the physical part often conveys what words cannot. Indeed, touch says something specific, and usually, that meaning is clear with context. Context itself is nuanced, though. This puts us in at an interesting crossroad as we begin to interact with technology in a more immediate, intimate, and tactile manner.

The quality of a touch from different sources provides different meanings. A light graze by my husband feels very different from a light graze from my boss. Sometimes I grab my niece firmly around the wrist to stop her, while other times I lightly hold her wrist to guide her. Timing is essential to the touch conversation. Timing allows us to be able to change the quality of our message to suite the context. We also need to be able to decode meaning when a touch is out of context. Touch in different areas of the body have very different meanings as well. If my mom were suddenly “touch” me through my phone I carry in my front pocket, I would become very uncomfortable.

Rendering Touch

How does one render the feeling of touch in digital space and devices? How specific does it need to be? Neo Rauch, a modern surrealist painter, says he leaves areas of his paintings murky and un-rendered because in dreams, there are illusions off in the corner of our perception that we sense in a particular way until we try to examine them up close. It is upon examination when we realize that thing in the periphery is just a mirage. But, before we realize that, our brain fills in all the details in order to make that which lingers on the edge seem significant.

That’s exactly when the illusion becomes the most believable: when there is just enough of the narrative for the viewer to put themselves into the story. It would be a folly to try to make the sensation of digital touch too specific. The mind will step in, frame it, and fill in the information to make it personal, to make it a visceral experience of a touch and not a manufactured one.

Phone calls are a great example of this. When I talk face-to-face. I physically experience the action. I can sense the vibration of my conversation partner’s voice in her body. Subconsciously, I feel the sound waves hit my body. I might even feel her voice move the air. But I don’t require all of that to believe that voice over the phone wires is that same person. My brain reenacts the physicality; my brain helps make the phone conversation authentic.

Our brains are funny that way—decoding things we don’t focus on to make sense of the world. We all operate from a unique frame of reference. Our experiences, our culture, our education, and our environment color this frame. Our frame of reference, with its accompanying baggage, shapes our perspective, and filters our experience. And within these frames, the brain creates schemas, discrete folders where we organize and store all the information we take in on a daily basis; these schemas become our mental models of our world. These cataloguing systems are necessary for us to be able to make meaning and experience cognition. I know something hard is inflexible because I have experienced it many times and every time I experience inflexible, I am actually instantaneously accessing all those experiences of hard = inflexible (and the related baggage) in order to understand what that means.

Exploring the Boundaries of Touch

As much as there needs to be just enough detail in the rendering of touch for the brain to fill in, it would be a worthwhile venture to explore deeply the intersection of technology and texture. There are many industries that could benefit from that type of development including manufacturing and textile. If I, as a clothing manufacturer, could actually feel the sample of cloth that is about to be used to make my new dress line on the other side of the globe, that would be of great benefit. This could then feed back to the consumer market because it would define how texture or tactile information could be shared. For example, I could wear a bracelet and whenever my husband wanted to “touch” my hand he could; the inside of the bracelet on my arm communicating the textural map of my wrist to the outside of the bracelet he wears and vice-versa.

Tactile technology could drastically change the shape of how mobile objects work. Maybe the shape of our mobile devices needs to change in order to accommodate a type of sensation. Perhaps it is time for this technology to take on some other metaphor that allows us to touch, and experience, our devices in a whole new way.

With several exciting projects underway, we are looking for perpetually curious, creative, and passionate people to join our team and tackle problems not found anywhere else. The right designers will have experience across a broad spectrum of interface challenges, with a targeted interest in creating multi-platform experiences using new technologies like touch, voice, and gesture. If you love to concept, design, and prototype in the space where consumer behavior, client brand, digital and physical interfaces meet, you might have what it takes to be a Kicker.

As a Senior Interaction Designer at Kicker you are tasked with researching, inventing, conceptualizing, and defining new paradigms for interaction with products across multiple contexts, and designing the cues and feedback necessary to make the technology behind them disappear. You prosper in a collaborative work environment; you enjoy partnering with our clients and our team, and you work well both on-site and remotely. You understand and can work with new technologies like touch, voice and gesture. You have the ability to communicate your thinking quickly, through sketching, models, wireframes and mock-ups. You tirelessly defend the user experience, and bend technology like a material to make the experience make sense.

You fit the Kicker profile if you:
Demonstrate mastery alongside the willingness to develop skills and learn new competencies; share opinions with the team; offer and receive sophisticated, thoughtful critiques; welcome the opportunity to watch ideas evolve through collaboration; manage multiple projects under tight deadlines while paying attention to detail; demonstrate initiative and adhere to deadlines; and play nicely with other intelligent and talented types.

Core Responsibilities

• Observe users and conduct interviews, ethnography and task analysis.
• Turn research findings into design opportunities and constraints.
• Develop concepts, user scenarios and personas to model user types, actions, goals and expectations.
• Refine ideas through wireframes, flow diagrams, storyboarding and rapid prototyping.
• Conduct usability studies of existing interfaces and prototype designs.
• Collaborate with sensory designers to craft interface cues and feedback.
• Create client-ready deliverables that communicate design thinking and facilitate decision making.
• Document form and behavior and develop functional interaction specifications.
• Travel if necessary.

Specific Requirements

• Five to seven (5-7) years creating interfaces, applications, and digital or physical products, including professional services experience.
• Advanced use of tools of the trade such as Illustrator, InDesign or Omnigraffle.
• Strong understanding of interaction design principles and best practices
• Understanding of wireless and mobile technologies, and design opportunities with emerging technology including touch, voice and gesture.

This is a three+ month contract position located San Francisco, CA with frequent client collaboration throughout the Bay Area.

How to apply: Submit a letter of interest with salary requirements, a resume and a link to your portfolio to ixdjobs [at] kickerstudio [dot] com.

Technology needs to respond in ways we understand. Technology needs to learn to speak human, not the other way around. We’re physical. Products are physical. The feedback between user and technology needs to be natural. We’re just now training technology to respond in ways that feel comfortable. Our experience with technology should always be personable, easy, and intuitive. User-friendly is no longer good enough.

The divide between technology and human started like this:

Rene Descartes, in the early 1600s–more than 100 years before the Industrial Revolution–envisioned the brain as a pump that moved “animating fluid” through the body. The mind, Descartes argued, had no body or form. Instead, it was an abstract entity that interacted with the body through the pineal gland. The modern computer, developed after WWII, embraced this mental model. The computer itself acted like the brain, as housing for the software that served as the computer’s mind.

Eventually, we combined two decidedly mechanical products to create a new technology: the typewriter and the television. People needed a simple manner of introducing commands to this new machine. Only our minds mattered in this new relationship because the computer’s mind operated on language. And in turn, we only needed to control the “mind” of the computer, not the “body”. The “body”, in true Descartian terms, was merely housing for the “mind”.

It was an easy relationship, and the mental model made sense. Almost everyone could understand the concept. That world, in there, where anything was possible (TV), was controlled through these specific language- based means (typewriter). We stayed on the outside, at bent-arms’ length, controlling its mind with a few keystrokes. Yet, we in so doing, we made the computer, and subsequent technology, an “other”. We quarantined it. We put it in a box and used specialized tools to control it. And we felt it was so powerful it needed to be dominated. Our precarious relationship with technology was fodder for science fiction.

In the Digital Age, our control over technology is rapidly changing, and we’re experiencing sci-fi realities. Perhaps, the most fundamental shift, though, is that we are developing a more physical relationship with it. We touch it and move it. We carry it in our pocket and sleep with it next to our bed. We’re letting it out of its box, its “body”, and creating new ways to engage with it. Technology is now in our personal space and we can communicate with it through touch, voice, and gesture just like we do to everything else in our physical world. We’re finally allowing ourselves to engage and connect with it.

“Embodied Cognition”

The evolution of technology control points comes at a time when our understanding of how the brain functions is also rapidly shifting. Beginning in the 1980s, scholars began to rethink the way we “think”. A growing body of new research suggests that we think not just with our brains, but also with our bodies. This is called embodied cognition.

In a recent study at the ad firm TBWA, researchers asked participants to draw where they experience certain emotions on a diagram of the body. Then the researchers overlaid all of the sketches. As you can see, people experience emotion all over the body, even though emotion is something most of us associate with the mind.

Sketches from a recent study by TBWA showing where participants experience emotion.

In 1995, a team of scientists in Italy made a major discovery. They found something called “mirror neurons”. These neurons respond in a similar way, whether we see someone perform an action, hear it described, or do the action ourselves. Because they play a role in both acting and thinking, mirror neurons suggested that the mind and body might not be so separate after all.

There are several recent studies–the latest published in November of 2008–that support this idea of embodied cognition. One showed that children solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking. Another suggested that stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving. And in one study published in 2007, subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it. These studies suggest that involving the body in thought actually helps cognition. Our mental experience is more than just the brain; it is physical as well.

Pattie Maes’ and Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense

There is a series of emerging technologies that capitalize on this evolving mind/body concept. Technologies like gesture, touch, haptics, and a multitude of physical sensors mean that we can confront and control technology like we do everything else in our world, with our embodied minds. We’ve lured technology out of the incubator and into the world. We can touch it. Move it. We can finally be physical with technology. This means there are new opportunities for innate control of technology, but first we need to establish new mental models to help people understand how to interact with technology in this way.

Many of these emerging technologies are still in their infancies and show up in gaming or secondary communication. We haven’t yet closed the logic loop of interacting with technology in this new bodily way. We have finally figured out technically how to detect these interactions, but we have forgotten to train the technology to respond in a way that we would expect. We are relying primarily on video or audio feedback, while our bodies innately expect multi-sensory feedback. So despite the fact that technology is increasingly present in our world, and we are increasingly dependent on it, we’re still trying contain it like we’re afraid it will take over.

The physicality we are now experiencing with technology changes our expectations of how the technology should respond. There are behaviors that we anticipate, intuit, when interacting fully with body and mind. When these rules are not present the interaction feels foreign and unfamiliar, and requires too much thought.

Working with emerging interface technologies requires understanding how people absorb information and create meaning. At Kicker we’re investigating how people communicate to create a more natural interface with technology. We are focused on how people expect these different technologies to communicate, and we’re intrigued with designing a bridge over that gap. Stay tuned for insights and guidelines for designing with emerging technologies in ways that feel comfortable, approachable, and compelling to people.

Please note: we were misinformed about the availability of real time feeds from NextBus, which does not just rely on the 4 yearly updates from MUNI but uses some feeds to inform when the bus will be there.

You can also read about Kicker’s idea on Fast Company’s blog.

When the focus is on what the technology can most easily detect, the gestures people have to make feel foreign and silly. When it comes to usable products, this is a tremendous barrier. Remember The Clapper? Part of what made it so amusing were the ridiculous commercials aimed at the elderly and smarmy, but the real issue is clapping as you are falling asleep is counter-intuitive and goofy. It was successful as a novelty, but didn’t manage to become indispensable. In the same way, gestural interfaces that make you do grandiose moves are fun in a game context (where it’s ok to step out of your comfort zone), but not when you’re trying to change the channel on your TV. Those big gestures feel like yelling, and when I’m on my couch watching TV, I’m more interested in feeling calm and tuning out. If the gestures feel foreign or goofy to me, I’m going to have a hard time remembering them and a harder time seeing how this product fits into my life.

To “make tech speak human” is to translate these expectations and needs into an interface that communicates in a language people understand. A great gesture set is easy to remember, feels comfortable, and makes the user forget life could exist without it. Natural, like a conversation.

Couldn’t make it? Don’t worry, we’ve posted videos of the talks for you to share and enjoy. And be sure to join us next year for our 3rd Device Design Day.

Liz Bacon, founder of Devise, talked about Extraordinary Design Considerations for Medical Devices.

Robert Brunner, Ammunition Group, talked about the importance of creating Ideas, Not Objects.

Charles Goran, T-Mobile, talked about Bringing the Sidekick Back.

Karen Kaushansky, Jawbone, talked about Designing Talking Devices.

Mike Kruzeniski, Windows Mobile, talked about the history of Graphic Design and the Elements of Interactive Style.

Branko Luckic, founder of NON-OBJECT, talked about a NON-OBJECT way of thinking of devices.

Jody Medich, co-founder of Kicker Studio, talked about Making Tech Tactile with a preview of Kicker’s Tactile Touchscreen Reader.

Dan Saffer, co-founder and alum of Kicker Studio, got the day going with a talk about Design in the Post-PC Era.

Cori Schauer, NASA, talked about the history of NASA’s Johnson Space Center’s Mission Control Center.

Leila Takayama, of Willow Garage, talked about Personal Robotic Devices.

We are unable to provide video of Leila’s talk at this time due to permission rights with research participants. However, she has provided us a copy of the slides which we are happy to share by request.

In order to continue the conversation about people, devices, design, and the future, we’ve asked the speakers to share their slides with you. We will continue to post them to our blog and to Device Design Day as they become available. We will also be posting videos from the event, so stay tuned.

Dan Saffer, co-founder and alum of Kicker Studio, got the day going with a talk about Design in the Post-PC Era.

 
Liz Bacon, Devise, presented Extrodinary Design Considerations for Medical Devices.

Charles Goran, TMobile, talked about Bringing the Sidekick Back.

Karen Kaushansky, Jawbone, discussed Designing Talking Devices.

And Kicker Co-Founder and Principal, Jody Medich talked about the importance of physical interface, and Making Technology Tactile.

After graduating in industrial design from San Jose State University in 1981, Robert co-founded the design consultancy Lunar. Subsequently, he was hired as Director of Industrial Design for Apple Computer where he served for 7 years. In 1996, he was appointed partner in the international firm Pentagram, helping lead the San Francisco office. In 2006, Brunner launched the start-up Fuego, a new concept in outdoor grilling. In 2007, Robert founded Ammunition, focusing on the overlap between product design, brand and experience. Around the same time, he helped launch the Beats by Dr. Dre brand of headphones with Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine and hip hop icon Dr. Dre.

Robert has received numerous awards for his work in product design from prestigious organizations such as IDSA, Red Dot, Good Design, and iF. His work is also included in the Museum of Modern Art product collections in New York and San Francisco. In 2008, Robert co-authored the book Do you matter? How great design will make people love your company along with Success Built to Last author Stewart Emery. He has also taught advanced product design at Stanford University.

He’ll be speaking at D3 about the notion of “Ideas, Not Objects,” and the importance of creating products that embody this principle.

What is the most cherished product in your life? Why?

This is hard to answer. I really don’t have a lot of things that I could describe as cherished. I have lots of things I like, and they tend to move in and out of “cherished” status. My Jasper Morrison “Low Pad” chairs are a long term love. Or my Eames benches that serve as coffee tables in my living room. But I guess my current cherish is my Audi S5. Love the car. Great merging of emotional/functional design, performance and sensitive detail. Above all I love the sound. It makes me feel great every time I drive it.

What’s the one product you wish you’d designed, and why?

Again, tough question. Lots of great things where I wish I’d thought of it or participated in its development. If I had to pick one I’d say the Olivetti Divisumma 18 calculator by Mario Bellini. Really obscure (today) and old school, I know. But it was always an inspirational piece for me. Great marriage of form, function, material, use and manufacturing. Google it. Totally cool.

What excites you about being a designer? Why do you keep doing it?

For as long as I can remember, I have always been about making things. Well before college, I was building things. Always fooling around creating something new in the garage. Being a designer affords me to fuel that passion on a day-to-day basis. Today, it’s not just about the objects, but also about building ideas, businesses and creating markets. But I inherited my father’s inventive side and my mother’s artistic side. So I really had no choice.

When do you first remember thinking of yourself as a designer?

I really did not know what it meant until design school. I original studied engineering because it was what my dad did, and again, because I wanted to make stuff. But not until I stumbled into it on a trip to the art building did I know the industrial design profession existed. In retrospect, I was a designer back in 5th grade as I built bikes in my garage. I just didn’t know it then.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned, and who taught it to you?

The most important lesson I have learned is that it’s not worth doing it unless its done right. This has been taught to my by the experience school of failed efforts and disappointments. Managing compromise is always part of the game in bringing things to market. But I’ve learned what the boundary conditions are of what it is that makes something great, and to fight hard not to cross them. At least then I can sleep at night.

What are 5 things all designers should know?

1. Perseverance. It’s hard to make great stuff. Never say die (for as long as you can).

2. Responsibility. You are driving things that will affect a lot of people, from your development partners and your clients, to the people who use the things you create. Don’t let it scare you or cause you to freeze up, but always be cognizant of the impact of your decisions.

3. How to communicate. Most designers do not know how to do this. Learn to write and speak well about your work. It will serve you for a long time and can be the difference maker.

4. Empathy. Learn how to put yourself in other’s shoes and see the situation and opportunities you’d miss from your eyes. It will make you very valuable

5. How to enjoy the journey. You have one of the best jobs in the world. It’s a long, wild ride, so have fun with it and don’t dwell too much on what went wrong. Keep your feet moving.

Don’t miss Robert’s presentation “Ideas, Not Objects” at Device Design Day,  This Friday, August 5th in San Francisco.