9

The Future Is Here

Now What?

Looking back on previous decades of conceptual design, I can confidently say that “the future is here” in terms of technological advances that were recently just idealized visions. Embedded electronics, cloud robotics, machine learning, and deep learning are just part of the palette available to us as product creators, but the true challenge is knowing how to use these well, and it will take a new generation of sophisticated, socially focused designers to weave that technology into the world we want for ourselves and future generations.

While the impetus for bringing a new product into the world may come from a business entity that’s seemingly removed from the design process, every important aspect of the interaction, as discussed in this book, can be brought back to an awareness of the social exchange that a person has with a product. While designers may have limited influence on the actions of the organizations for which they work, they can raise awareness of social responsibility within a company and make their voices heard. It’s up to product creators to reflect on the human values that are supported by a product and make design decisions based on a genuine desire to grow what we love best about being human—that is, being collaborative, creative, socially driven creatures working to make life together just a little bit better.

The Social Robot’s Time Has Come

I’ve discussed many case studies of products that are already harnessing technology to enrich people’s lives through social features, be they relationships between people and other people with whom they are connected, people and their products, or people and the environment around them.

We saw that the robot Moxi is able to be a trainable team member to help exhausted and short-staffed nurses. It was designed to relieve some of the burden of physical labor around managing supplies to maximize the meaningful in-person time that nurses could spend with patients. Requiring “robot training” would be just one more arduous task on a nurse’s already full plate, so a product with social intelligence that can be taught new tasks and execute them with minimal supervision is a robot that “gets” the people around it. The robot’s physical presence as a team member available in hospital hallways provides a level of emotional support that would otherwise not be there, letting health-care workers know that help is available to offload physical tasks.

We considered the hands-free, at-a-glance benefits of expressive, intuitive products that communicate with people in socially intelligent shorthand, like the Neato floor-cleaning vacuum that chirps and sings to let you know when it’s done its job or if it needs help and the Hammerhead bicycle navigation aid that glows brightly through a waterproof shell to create immediate, simple, dynamic, directional maps.

We considered how expression combined with sensing leads to a dialogue of interactions, like ElliQ’s caring, helpful presence to assist an older person who might benefit from a tablet computer but finds that using it is cognitively challenging. It translates swipes and button presses into plain human interactions, deciphering the actions of navigating tasks and apps by replacing them with expressive gestures and conversations in the form of light, sound, and movement, eliminating codes and control panels. It also demonstrates the importance of offering a nudge here and there for a game, social event, or exercise challenge to encourage health and wellness through its programmed interactions that become more sophisticated and personalized as the person continues to use it.

We discussed the importance of contextual sensitivity in creating products that give us only the information we want, with the disruption we can handle at precisely the time and place that we need it, such as the Clever Coat Rack that comes to life as you pass it in the hallway and provides weather info in time to grab an extra layer or umbrella.

We looked at how ecosystems of connected products can take advantage of cloud-based computing and community-level cooperation to help people in new ways, like the Tile tracking system that lets people share their connected devices to help someone find a lost wallet or phone, and the Citi Bike bicycle-sharing service that lets people plan rides through the city through different touchpoints like a kiosk and smartphone app. It even piggybacks on people’s travel behaviors to manage the redistribution of bikes by rewarding “volunteers” who will drop bikes off at less common return areas. In this case, it’s using people’s collective social behavior to feed logistics algorithms to benefit the system at large.

And we considered how various aspects of what’s commonly called AI can be used as tools to process the enormous amount of data that takes place during truly social exchanges and distill it to responses that feel socially appropriate, bringing contextual awareness and empathy to the voice-based robots that are starting to be great assistants but still need a little nudge to make us feel like they really totally “get” us.

In looking at the ways social design can enhance the rapport we have with our products, it’s clear that what exists today is just beginning to take advantage of the potential. As a pioneering territory rich with opportunity but poor in established patterns or models, the best experiences will emerge from product concepts that are envisioned through fresh eyes, like the smart microphone that points toward the person speaking, gives a clear indication of when it’s listening, and takes notes along the way or the clever chandelier that guides dinner-party guests in a choreographed arrangement through the evening by adjusting its height, light distribution, and color temperature.

The Victory Is Bittersweet

The promise is enormous and designers can realize it, but the flip side of all this tantalizing potential is the daunting responsibility that comes with utilizing the power of social design. This particularly human-centered way of guiding the design process can lead to products that influence behavior, providing a level of emotional comfort that can also seduce people into a state of trust and make them susceptible to less than ideal outcomes.

Whereas in past decades computing devices have been developed in a race to improve technical capabilities like responsiveness, accuracy, and resolution, the critical area of exploration is now clearly the cognitive and emotional aspects of what makes a product work for a person using it. In other words, we’re at a tipping point where the “how” is no longer as relevant as the “what,” and with that come bigger questions of accountability and the ethics surrounding the impact that a social product can have on people’s lives.

In my career as a designer in the early stages of the introduction of personal robots into society, I watched with awe as the kinds of products I work on became accepted into everyday life and started to show real evidence of making a positive impact on how we live. Moxi is one example of something I have seen bring great value to hospital workers and, ultimately, patients. In real hospital settings, it’s been successful in actively reducing nurses’ stress and offering the chance for more human face-to-face attention to be paid to patients whose material needs can be served by a robot working behind the scenes.

A furry, sensor-laden, seal-shaped robot called PARO is another example of a product that seemed, even to an avid robotics enthusiast like myself, to be an outrageously frivolous idea at first blush but emerged as a huge success as a genuinely therapeutic device. It can be perched on a person’s lap and will purr, vibrate, and look up toward them in response to gentle stroking and cuddling. Studies with dementia patients have revealed the robot’s benefits in reducing stress, increasing motivation, and improving the ways patients socialize with their caregivers and with each other. So there are a lot of great things that robots are doing by building on a foundation of socially intelligent design and interacting with people in ongoing dynamic and visceral exchanges.

During the Covid-19 pandemic that was unfolding as I wrote this book, I watched a veritable explosion of interest in social robots. My Slack conversations with Tom, my RoboPsych podcast host, included links to articles with titles like “Hospital Ward Staffed Entirely by Robots Opens in China,” “Meet Humanity’s New Ally in the Coronavirus Fight: Robots,” and “This Sushi Restaurant Takes Contactless Delivery to a New Level by Using a Robot.”1

I wanted to feel excited about the obvious business opportunities that were suddenly emerging in the precise area of design in which I had built a career based on a decade-plus of focused expertise. After all, I had put my energy into a vision of tangible, socially intelligent interaction that was finally being realized. Instead, I felt disheartened. While I’ve always wanted to see product creators truly master the ability to offer the “product as its own social entity” experience described in the interaction model early on in this book, I’m despondent at the idea of people using products as stand-ins for human contact.

During an intense six weeks of Covid-19 lockdown at home, I watched images of robotic social products emerge in the media like a parade of cold plastic substitutes for true human contact. The New York Times reported on May 20, 2020, “A City Locks Down to Fight Coronavirus, but Robots Come and Go,” along with dystopic images of deserted cityscapes populated by delivery robots roaming the streets.2 Instead of social robot development emerging in response to the joy of great experiences, I witnessed an industry built on a foundation of intense fear and the drive to avoid human touch at all costs.

At a moment when public transportation was poised to enter a heyday, buoyed by a postmillennial generation that couldn’t care less about car ownership, we are instead seeing a mass retreat into personal vehicles. As a native New Yorker who grew up riding the subway with parents who saw public transportation as a great melting pot of tolerance, I reveled in the intense soup of humanity that I got from mundane moments of city life, like boarding the bus with a hoard of excited beachgoers headed to Orchard Beach, crowding next to strangers to watch fireworks from the West Side Highway, or standing in line to get into screenings of Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show.

Now, new isolation-based social rituals like drive-by graduations and video parties are becoming the norm as people avoid buses and trains at all costs. Exuberant in-person meetings and presentations have been replaced by Zoom videoconferences and telepresence devices. And in-person retail experiences like visiting a nearby grocery store or boutique have been replaced by Amazon deliveries wherever possible, driving struggling local businesses into the ground.

And just at a time when people have gained important awareness of the need to be vigilant about their privacy and data rights, we see fear driving local governments and large organizations like schools and factories to pressure people into opting in to tracking apps, sometimes with little transparency around what data is being collected and how it will be stored and accessed. An Australian app based on Singapore’s TraceTogether software uses Bluetooth signals to log when people have been close to one another, and though it will not track location, it still brings up concerns around privacy. One of China’s systems will collect citizens’ identity, location, and online payment history, granting local police power over those who break quarantine rules.

Product Creators Hold the Key

In my 2017 TEDxBrussels talk, “Will the Robots Take Over? Only If We Let Them,” I cajoled the audience into an uncomfortable spot by progressively presenting increasingly controversial ideas of social robots in everyday situations. I started with a concept image of a souped-up social washing machine, then moved on to a dog-walking drone and, finally, the pièce de résistance, a robotic nanny, complete with a gripper arm ready to embrace my lone two-year-old reaching toward it. The audience groaned, my Twitter stream flamed, and I made my point that rather than falling for the trope of robotic overlords gaining sentience and overtaking humanity, the real goal should be to consciously decide where we see value in technology serving everyday life and using those values to drive the products that we make and buy. Robotic tub scrubber? Sure, sign me up! Robotic dog walker maybe. Robotic nanny? Oh my heavens, no!

“Dull, Dirty, and Dangerous” have been hallmarks for areas in life where robotic assistants make the most sense, but needs get very murky when we get into tasks like eldercare robots or therapeutic devices that don’t fit into those extreme categories. Ethical concerns become even more thorny when considering products that will be used by vulnerable populations such as children and those suffering from psychological and cognitive impairments. Designers need to consider larger questions around how products will be used, with an understanding that the power of manipulation by a social entity is real.

For example, privacy is a growing area of concern in the world of social product intelligence. While the “camera as everything sensor” feature is core to so many of the wonderful intuitive person-product exchanges extolled in this book, it also opens people up to potentially enormous privacy violations. As product creators we sit in between business and technology teams yet exist squarely in neither, so it’s tempting to throw our hands up in the air, capitulating to the idea that a control of privacy is a lost cause. But as a product designer, I think we can do better by offering more transparency regarding what’s being collected and how it’s being stored. Instead of the mind-numbing legalese that people face when they install a new app, there could be clear illustrations of privacy implications that simply state how and why camera data will be used and iconography that indicates camera viewing and recording status. Products can also let people know what’s happening behind the scenes in the “robot brain” by taking advantage of nonverbal cues like indicator lights, subtle tones, and expressive movements to communicate when surveillance or recording is taking place.

Our Opportunity as Product Creators

Throughout this book it’s been exciting to share the genuine joy and optimism I feel around the vision of a future with robots in our everyday lives, embedded into sofas and sports bras and riding alongside us in autonomous delivery carts and connected bicycles. The opportunity for designers and other product creators to craft expressive, interactive, contextually relevant, ecosystem-enhanced, socially aware products that truly “get” us is a rich one that holds a great deal of promise for a future in which we cherish products rather than growing bored with them and searching for the next best thing.

We have before us a vast, underexplored palette of technological advances that can be harnessed to enhance our connections with people in faraway places, manage our personal health and wellness, enrich education and support lifelong learning, and relieve us of stressful and burdensome tasks to reveal more time and energy to spend on each other. If we can keep our sights focused on the potential for robotics to enhance the positive and enriching aspects of everyday life, we can introduce new products into the world while enjoying the excitement of watching their benefits unfold through people’s relationships with them.

The tools are in front of us. It’s up to us to grab them and build our visions for the best future we can imagine.

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