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Introduction

“Smart” Is Not Enough—Products Need to Be Social

You’re not crazy to thank Alexa when she checks the weather. It’s not nuts to name your car Keith (or Fred or Celeste). And it’s perfectly normal to want to repair your Roomba out of loyalty rather than replace it when it breaks.

FIGURE 1-1

The Roomba Robot Vacuum

An often-cited Georgia Tech study of people first using the Roomba Robot Vacuum—a device that looks like a twelve-inch round puck, with no deliberate features to make it seem like it has a face, body, or limbs—revealed that people saw it as a social entity, giving it names and talking to it directly.1 I often thought much of this behavior stemmed from the gee-whiz factor or the novelty of having a “robotic” vacuum cleaner, but as a mainstream product that’s been around since 2002 it still evokes this kind of response. Here’s a quick look at recent amazon.com reviews:2

Stephanie, “I can walk barefoot!!! Clean floors!,” August 16, 2018. Roomba 675: “Our family immediately named her Hazel, and after several hours of hard work, I have no qualms about keeping her on my payroll. ;-)

After Hazel ventured under the china cabinet (who knows when that area last saw my broom), my son said, ‘Hey! The fuzzies are gone!! She’s good!’ ”

Amya, “Time Saver/Allergen Reducer,” December 2, 2018. “I love this little guy. We named him Wall-E because how could you not?

The first few times he runs it will seem like a struggle (at least to me it did). But after about the third or fourth time, he seemed to be able to make his way around the apartment with ease. He has gotten stuck a few times but has managed to wiggle free on his own.”

Stephen and Susan, “Better than my husband,” April 14, 2020. “It’s definitely more reliable than my husband. It also does what I want better than my husband. I turn it on and leave the house and when I come back it at least did what I wanted it to. No excuses.”

These examples are recent, but people have interacted socially with products long before there were computers, LEDs, or microchips. We have embraced special pillows, caressed key holders, and praised our washing machines. The social connection between person and product is only amplified when we add smartness, or the ability of a product to sense what we’re doing and respond appropriately. Behaviors like these are informed by the social norms, psychological responses, and interaction patterns that we have with other people, even if the things we’re interacting with are not people and we know it. Moreover, these tendencies grow stronger rather than weaker the more people interact, and great design plays a big role in the success of the interaction. The better the social exchange, the deeper the relationship a person has with a product and the better the experience overall. As technology becomes more sophisticated and microprocessors shrink to become embedded in everything from tennis rackets to syringes, we can program their behaviors as though they were little robotic entities.

As humans we are driven to be social. We have evolved to benefit from, value, and enjoy living together in groups, and we instinctively seek out interactions with people around us, something the 2020 pandemic has made us acutely aware of. The social scientist Michael Argyle argued that people are social animals for evolutionary reasons—that is, community structures help ensure the food and shelter we need to survive.3 This makes us so highly attuned to social signals that we perceive them even when they aren’t there: we see faces on products when there is no humanlike or animallike anatomy in the design and attribute emotions and intent to inanimate objects.4 We talk about a broken product as being “sick” or “on strike.” People will often call into customer service desks complaining that their devices “don’t like them” or are “acting up.”

Objects can’t serve as substitutes for that human closeness we all crave; however, our deep need for social interaction makes us prone to interpreting interactions with products as social whether we are aware of it or not. Even devices that appear to behave in only vaguely communicative ways evoke sociality-based reactions.

Product Psychosis: Why “Smart” Products Aren’t So Smart

As the consumer products we own start to sense things in our environment, move about our living and working spaces, and perform tasks on our behalf, the importance of the social interactions we have with devices will only grow. Some people think the instinct to interact socially with products is something to fight against, or a sentimental weakness to overcome. To designers like myself who are immersed in the practice of creating meaningful interactions, this is like trying to fight people’s preferences for a variety of colors or their need to have written materials laid out in a manner that is easy to read—the best products come from working with people’s preferences, tendencies, and limitations. Our designs can work in harmony with natural tendencies, and to work well, social qualities should be designed on purpose, rather than left to happen by accident. This book makes explicit something that successful interaction designers—who are also essentially “social designers”—do as an inherent and integral part of their work.

As technology’s influence on our lives continues to rise, Hollywood has us fearing the specter of being taken over by intelligent machines, but the scary thing is that we have already been taken over by machines that aren’t really intelligent at all. While it may seem that concern about robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) prevails in popular media, people are nonetheless eagerly purchasing consumer products with increasingly “smart” features. Many so-called smart products on the market are like the cringeworthy cousin who comes to visit and with whom you find it difficult to relate no matter how hard you try. After a day of awkward exchanges, you can’t wait for him to leave. Between his perpetual interruptions with left-field anecdotes when you’re concentrating on cooking and his inappropriately regaling your five-year-old with off-color jokes, you need a moment in a scream room just to recover.

How Do Today’s Products Fall Short?

To answer this, we’ll take a look at the automatic door, a product so ubiquitous and commonplace that we seldom question why it behaves so poorly from a social point of view. Dr. Wendy Ju, assistant professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the information science field at Cornell University, describes this interaction vividly in her book, The Design of Implicit Interactions.5

Imagine a doorman who does not acknowledge you when you approach. He stands there, silent and still, until you inch your way closer to the entrance. When you get to a distance of about two feet, boom! He abruptly flings the doors wide open. If you arrive after hours, you may find yourself waiting uncomfortably before you come to the realization that the doors are locked. The doorman’s blank stare, unfortunately, gave you no clue. Upon meeting such a gatekeeper, many of us might run away, suspecting psychosis, yet this discomforting behavior is typical of our day-to-day interactions with not only automatic doors but many other devices designed to improve the quality of our lives. From Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa, which eavesdrops without reminding us that it’s there, to automatic lights that cloak us in darkness if we sit too still in a desk chair, many of the products we rely on lack sensitivity to the social cues and norms humans use to communicate and interact with one another.

Despite their failures as social entities, responsive products are here to stay and increasingly becoming essential in our cooking, cleaning, entertainment, health care, security, and hygiene. We are at a watershed moment in which technology can support almost any function that product designers and entrepreneurs envision, and the opportunities are limited only by our imagination. When a product does achieve the nirvana of authentic human interaction, studies show that its creators are rewarded with greater customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. Despite this success, too many products still rely on crude behavioral designs that flunk the “normal” test. The solution, therefore, is not more technology but better—that is, more human and social—design.

Integrating Social Design into Product Creation

This book focuses on enabling technology to humanize consumer products through socially informed interactions. It will illuminate how sensitive people are to social, cultural, and personal norms and why it is important for products to adapt appropriately to these contexts. Through case studies, lab experiments, and interviews with experts it will showcase how design makes the difference between good and bad products, providing inspiration and advice to anyone who wants to embrace today’s technology through new products. Each chapter will provide vivid examples of good and bad product design, along with concrete guidelines about how to conceptualize, build, and optimize interactive products. The aim is to cut through the intimidating chatter of high tech to showcase a vision for smart technology that understands and adopts the social values, norms, and protocols that we use to interact seamlessly with one another every day.

Social designers anticipate the exchanges people will have with a product in different situations and then craft the details of the interaction, taking into account how the product looks and feels throughout a typical exchange (and, ideally, throughout the life of the product). This will mean building a script of sorts that details what actions and reactions will take place, what the person’s needs are, and how the product can fulfill those needs. Though that script may sometimes include verbal messages such as “Battery charging is complete” or “Service required soon,” it just as often involves other modalities, such as light, sound, and motion, that communicate the same messages, only through abstraction, such as a flashing red light that indicates something is amiss.

Although the designers are used to thinking about the communicative abilities of formal characteristics such as color, typography, and materials, these more dynamic characteristics are a whole new ball of wax, giving an object the appearance of agency and making it feel “alive.” This pioneer territory requires designers to work together with engineers, psychologists, programmers, design researchers, and marketers to acknowledge and collaboratively create a lexicon around how social characteristics are applied to product creation.

From a business perspective, it will be critical to build teams of people who can understand the technologies of interaction, as well as the psychological and social rules that govern people’s responses to different interaction designs. The next generation of product designers and team leaders will need a broad suite of skills beyond those taught to designers today.

In other words, making sure that our products “get” us is a complex task that requires a great deal of insight, planning, and exploration. There’s no one formula, and it’s not all about algorithms. For the human touch to emerge as an outcome of product development, we need to focus on crafting the right social interaction from day one. That’s what My Robot Gets Me is all about.

How Social Design Works—A Framework

Social interaction is complex and many layered. For an appropriate depth of understanding in creating socially savvy products, we must draw on insights from the social and behavioral sciences, from engineering and computer science, and from marketing and management science. The integration of these multiple perspectives is required to design the social lives of products well. This may be why well-designed interactive products are still rare.

FIGURE 1-2

The Five Rings in the Social Life of Products Framework

The social interaction we have with products should be considered and articulated by a product team before any other design decisions are made. When armed with the knowledge and techniques described in this book, product managers will hopefully encourage their teams to reflect more deeply on the nature of our relationships with products to envision great interactions before talking about features or technical characteristics.

My Robot Gets Me is organized using a framework that maps out the expanding scopes of interaction. It starts at the core, examining the presence of socially interactive products themselves—examples, core technologies, component parts—and goes on to discuss interaction between people and their products and the designers who make these products. Next is a look at expression in interactive products—what is communicated by interactive products, how, and to what effect. Interaction goes beyond expression to think of the back-and-forth dialogue that occurs when products can sense and respond to people. The types of interactions and what they mean depend a lot on the context in which they take place; this includes not only the environment in which interaction is occurring but also the task, timing, purpose, and role of the interaction. Encompassing everything is the ecosystem, which accounts for the broader product family, product ecosystem, and business model that influence the how and why of the product and its interactions.

As we move from focusing on the product toward the larger ecosystem that products are in, we’re also able to move from the whatrobot vacuum cleaner!—to the how and whykeeping my house clean without having to get dirty. All parts of the product are operating simultaneously and are critical to product success, but each part is complicated enough that it needs to be attended to separately.

By examining all the different layers of a product’s social life, we can gain a big-picture view of all the factors that influence the interactions we will have with future products and how many levels of design need to be addressed to create successful social interaction with people. By focusing on scales of concern rather than discipline, we hope to bring together the disparate areas of study and expertise needed to address the design of interactive products at each level.

Social Product Literacy Is for Everyone

As technology-based products become more sophisticated, an understanding of their inner workings becomes increasingly difficult to decipher. Rather than have the average consumer believe that their interactive products operate by “magic,” we need to spark and develop an interest in how and why products work. And this goes for everyone involved in product creation and management. While this book is aimed at professionals directly involved in the development of products for consumer use, it can also appeal to a general audience of product enthusiasts. An increased understanding of social product design will lead to a higher demand for socially well-designed products that are highly crafted and thoughtfully executed

At this moment in history, we’re on the brink of an important new change in product design. No longer are we just making devices for the highly motivated 1 percent who are technically savvy and prepared to learn the ins and outs of complex systems, however tedious that might be. Now, the user base for interactive devices includes children and the elderly, people who have different levels of language proficiency and varying degrees of experience with electronic devices. A recent Pew Research Center report states that “Roughly two-thirds of those ages 65 and older go online and a record share now own smartphones.”6 Whereas a smart watch may have seemed like a frivolous and complex gadget suited only for early adopters, we now see people buying them for their Luddite family members, such as my friend Susan, who recently gave an Apple Watch to her ninety-year-old father to enjoy for its elegant styling and hands-free messaging. The fact that the watch will alert her should he happen to fall is a bonus that everyone appreciates regardless of what they think of the intrusion of “modern technology” into everyday life.

As interactive devices become more portable and robust, we are designing not only for work or home environments but for every environment people find themselves in, be it on the road, in a crowd, or even underwater.

The spring of 2020 brought with it a profound and abrupt change to daily life with the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic. People went from a Friday evening of hanging out in restaurants, attending parties, and strolling through galleries to a shut-in Monday morning of sheltering in place, working remotely, and leaving home only when necessary for food, medication, or life-threatening emergency needs. People scrambled to make up for the loss of social contact, turning to technology to fill the gaps. People who “hated” video chat were suddenly the family experts on Zoom’s multiparticipant features, organizing virtual Trivial Pursuit games and online parties. Residents of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities were given crash courses in FaceTime and WhatsApp to keep in touch with loved ones. Going to work meant logging on from the living room, and telemedicine became a household word. And others who had never given robotics a second thought were waxing philosophical about the potential for automated robot delivery services, no-contact grocery pickup lockers, and roving disinfection devices.

Although the research and writing for this book were in progress for several years before the pandemic, the advent of Covid-19 highlighted the importance of this subject more than ever before. When people had to suddenly learn to use new devices to work, feed their families, and get medical advice, they needed to intuit how to communicate with the devices on hand, and pronto. There was no time for poring over user manuals or following elaborate tutorials, and the products with the stronger social abilities are the ones that won people’s trust and loyalty because they just simply worked in the way people expected.

Products at the Intersection of the Physical and the Digital

While product can refer to a piece of software or an app, this book will look holistically at every aspect of the experience, taking into consideration the product’s materials, forms, and relationship to the body as well as any digital characteristics, such as screen-based messaging, and the dynamic characteristics of light, sound, and movement. We’ll consider obvious examples of social design, such as smart assistants, chatbots and voice agents like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant, but will also look at those with more subtle interfaces that may not have an actual voice at all and respond with what might be thought of as a robotic language, like the chirps, lights, and motions of Star Wars’ R2-D2 or Pixar’s WALL-E. They might be as simple as a microphone that pivots toward the person speaking or a wristband that vibrates to communicate an incoming message.

The most powerful aspect of our relationships with our products will be the split-second, near-telepathic exchanges that can happen when we learn to decipher representational messages such as a flicker of light, a sequence of tones, or a gestural movement—the kinds of messages that can benefit from our full attention yet can also take place in our peripheral vision. Furthermore, products with sophisticated and contextually sensitive interaction will have learned from their exchanges with us. They’ll maintain a memory of what we like, dislike, understand, or don’t understand, and they will ultimately adapt to best serve us.

A product’s ability to navigate physical spaces through light, sound, and motion give it the power to not only occupy an area but transform it as well, illuminating parts of a room, occupying walls, floors, or tables in varied ways, or beckoning with sounds from another room. Our relationship with these products will grow beyond the one-on-one, flat experience of a face in front of a screen to encompass a full-bodied interplay, a dance of sorts between a person and the objects in his or her environment.

Why Me?

I’ve always had a passion for creating objects. I began my career as a mechanical engineer, a role that seemed like the logical path for someone wanting to make things by combining creativity and a penchant for technical pursuits. After over seven years of combined experience as a design engineer and product researcher, I decided to reflect on my experience by returning to graduate school to explore the human side of product creation through a master’s program at Cranbrook Academy of Art, an institution recognized for its rich history in American design—Eliel Saarinen and Charles Eames were founding faculty members—as well as being a hotbed of provocative idea generation. At Cranbrook it was thrilling to recognize that great design work consisted of more questions than answers. In my own research in the late 1990s, my inquiry focused on the potential for blending the physical and the digital in a holistic experience in which objects could come to life through programmed behaviors. I began with a series of experimental projects and haven’t stopped exploring since.

After graduate school, I had the great fortune of working at some of the world’s best design firms, including famed designer Karim Rashid’s office and product consultancy frog design, eventually finding focus at the innovation design firm Smart Design, where I created the Smart Interaction Lab, an initiative focused on design explorations in the form of tinkering and hands-on experimentation around topics such as expressive objects, digital making, and presence and awareness. My work at Smart honed in on interactive physical products, and it’s there that I began to recognize that the ideas about smart objects being explored by me and my colleagues in academia were beginning to find their way into everyday objects in a real and practical way. I led several design teams working on a range of products, from kitchen appliances to medical devices, toys, and automotive interiors, and served as a hybrid in a totally new territory of design that lay at the intersection of the physical and the digital.

My work in this new area brought me to a number of wonderful work experiences, and I found myself drawn to both industry and academia; I loved the satisfaction of directly influencing people’s lives through the former and the thrill of placing one foot in the future through the bleeding-edge research of the latter. I have managed to find a balance between the two, continually teetering on the edge of different worlds. I’ve enjoyed sharing my passion by translating ideas from engineers to creatives and vice versa. The projects I’ve worked on have appeared on the covers of Popular Science, Technology Review, and the New York Times Sunday Review,7 as well as Time magazine’s top inventions of 2019, and my excitement for exploring the frontiers of product interaction has led to my being frequently called upon to write and speak internationally on the social impact of design and technology on our everyday lives.

Before joining Smart, I began a decade-long relationship as a key member of the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab founded by Dr. Andrea Thomaz at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007.8 Together with a mechanical engineer named Jonathan Holmes, we were the core team for the lab’s seminal social robot platform, named Simon, which was used to study all the ways we might interact with computing machines in an intuitive and human way by gesturing, speaking, exchanging tools and other objects, and working collaboratively in a variety of environments, such as kitchens and lobbies.9 When Andrea brought her research and her lab to the University of Texas at Austin, we continued our collaboration, giving me the chance to dive deeper into social robot design while gathering learnings from human-robot interaction research that I could apply to other consumer product work taking place at Smart and, eventually, in my own independent studio. In 2017 Andrea founded Diligent Robotics, a company that creates robotic products for the health-care industry, and I had the honor of coming on board as the company’s head of design. Diligent’s signature product, Moxi, is a highly interactive robot that’s currently deployed in a number of hospitals in the United States.

While not every product will be a complex robot such as Moxi, the nuances of interaction that take place on a regular basis between a robot and the people who use it can be applied to many types of products, even those as seemingly mundane as toothbrushes, coffee makers, microphones, and scooters. The potential for applied robotics to improve our social interaction with everyday objects is nothing short of remarkable and, as the inspiration for My Robot Gets Me, will inform stories and insights that appear throughout the book.

FIGURE 1-3

Moxi, the Highly Interactive Hospital Robot

In addition to my work as a design consultant in the robotics realm, I have applied my passion to the creation of the 4D Design Department at my alma mater, Cranbrook.10 A highly selective MFA program for students who want to explore the intersection of code, form, and electronics, it functions as an experimental laboratory for creative applications of technology. The department explores the myriad ways that the physical world around us has become infused with an undercurrent of flowing data, turning everyday experiences into connected, feedback-driven interactions that are transforming every aspect of culture and society. As the academy’s first new program in forty-seven years, it builds on Cranbrook’s historic legacy of experimental design activities while redefining craft to encompass a broad range of outcomes, including interactive objects, projected images, embedded electronics, applied robotics, computer-controlled machining, three-dimensional printing, and mixed-reality environments.

This book is based on material that I teach at Cranbrook 4D that has evolved from the courses I created for the School of Visual Arts, University of Pennsylvania, and Parsons School of Design, some of the country’s first courses focused on designing smart objects. To complement my teaching and client work, I cohost the RoboPsych podcast, a biweekly discussion around design and the psychological impact of human-robot interaction.11 Together with Tom Guarriello, a PhD psychologist, branding expert, and RoboPsych’s founder, we explore the impact of robotics on society and culture and look toward future products and systems through in-depth interviews with experts.

My Robot Gets Me blends the content I’ve created for my teaching, speaking, podcast hosting, and writing with the insights from my experience as a consumer product designer along with the ongoing learning from Diligent’s cutting-edge robots that are currently in use out in the field. Throughout this text you will see commentary and wisdom from colleagues in industry and academia blended with anecdotes and interviews about projects that I’ve observed over two decades of pioneering work.

How to Use This Book and Who It’s For

My Robot Gets Me is meant for a wide audience. Readers involved in the product development process but who do not have formal training in design can use it as a primer that ranges over contemporary ideas and practice in interaction design and user experience design. It will help them to better connect with colleagues who are deeper in the trenches of product development and working on creating the product’s inner workings. People with a background in design will recognize familiar concepts in the first few chapters, with an expansion of fundamental design ideas to encompass the world of smart objects as the text progresses into the later chapters. It will be helpful as a way to gather deeper knowledge around applying robotics to product design; it can also serve as a useful text to share with less design-oriented colleagues throughout an organization in order to form a bridge for idea exchanges, allowing everyone to share a mental model of a product’s potential and collaboratively envision opportunities for product and service creation. Ideally, it can help people to advocate for a social approach rather than a tech/features-based approach in their own organizations, supporting those championing the big picture in product interaction and getting everyone in the organization on board. Finally, it may also appeal to a general audience of readers who have an enthusiasm for contemporary product design and want to learn more about how things are created in order to better appreciate their uses and make smart purchasing decisions.

The Organization of the Book

My Robot Gets Me takes a layered approach to the idea of the product as its own social entity. Using the product context framework described above, the book will explain how to conceive of the critical aspects of an interactive device, taking into account its physical presence; the ways it expresses itself; techniques for seeing, hearing, and understanding people and its environment; its human social context; and its relationship to services and other products in an ecosystem. Each chapter relates to a ring in the framework and will explore how interactive devices function at that scope, presenting illustrative examples and analyzing key aspects. Each chapter will wrap up with guidelines and principles for how to design interactive devices that come with that framing of the product.

How Social Design Works: Affordances and Interaction

Chapter 2 offers a foundation for concepts that will be expanded upon throughout the course of the book. It will consider how key aspects of cognitive science set the stage for how a product is perceived by a person using it and provide the groundwork for product creators to envision how people and products communicate with one another.

Product Presence: Form Follows Feeling

Chapter 3, on presence, represents the core of the framework, delving into the overall impression of a product, beginning with its physical shape and material characteristics. It will discuss how physical attributes establish the foundation of a social relationship between people and their products and why the physical world still matters despite our devotion to the immaterial world of screens, apps, and software.

Object Expression: Communicating Behavior

Chapter 4, on expression, looks at how a product communicates outwardly to the people using it. It will look at core messages that a product needs to communicate, such as aspects of its operation and information that it needs to proceed in completing tasks. And it will explore how the basic modalities of sound, light, and motion can contribute to messaging that can be effective through both nonverbal and verbal cues.

Interaction Intelligence: The Rich Conversation between Objects and People

Chapter 5, on interaction, delves into the complexities of communication between product and person as they relate to the next ring in our framework. It starts with an understanding of how products can communicate messages outwardly, as explored in Chapter 2, but then branches out to look at what happens when it’s taking in and responding to sensor data, creating an ongoing and ever-changing feedback loop. It will provide an overview of how products understand the people and world around them and then explore key patterns for effective exchanges.

Designing Context: The Right Interaction for the Right Time and Frame of Mind

Chapter 6, on context, is about how the human social context in which a product will be used should affect every design decision. It starts with a look at the physical situation in which the product’s use takes place (home, work, outdoors, indoors, winter, summer, etc.) and continues to include a consideration of the person’s state of mind when using the product (calm, anxious, engaged, distracted, etc.). Good design will take into account context, using data input from the person and the environment to determine changes in context and respond appropriately.

Designing Ecosystems: Connecting Everything Together

Chapters 3–6 will look at individual products pretty much in isolation, but many powerful experiences happen when products interact with one another as part of a system, such as the way a smartphone, watch, and speaker might work together to offer calendar information and verbal reminders. Chapter 7, on ecosystems, looks at how services are linked to a host of different products that can respond individually depending on use cases and contexts while also acting in unison to provide data to the larger system.

Intelligence on Many Levels: AI and Social Savvy

Chapter 8 provides a look at where social objects are going next by gauging the success of today’s smart products while also examining the technology trends at the forefront of academic and industry research that focus on social intelligence as the future of product intelligence. It examines how evolving capabilities will shape how we integrate products into our daily lives and what types of interactions we can hope to achieve.

The Future Is Here: Now What?

Chapter 9 offers a review of key concepts explored throughout the book and challenges designers to reflect upon how human values can be supported by new product relationships.

Each chapter makes a case for what matters at the scope of its layer, how it influences the social life of products, and what designers need to consider at that level. Join me as I embark on the journey of considering how social products are developed, starting with the fundamental importance of what an object’s physical presence signifies to the people who will use it.

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