Hasta La Ideas

In anticipation of Device Design Day 2011, we’ve partnered with Kicker Studio to bring you a series where speakers from this year’s conference reflect on six questions about design and their practice. D3 brings together visual, interaction and industrial designers for a multi-disciplinary conversation about the design of consumer electronics and objects with embedded technology.

Device Design Day is less than a month away and we’re back with our 5th conversation with the speakers at this year’s conference. As a 14-year-veteran of the speech recognition industry, Karen Kaushansky knows a thing or two about interaction design and the importance of making devices work for users. Read on to learn more about Kaushansky’s insights on the 8-track, pod coffeemakers and devices that change user behavior.

Karen Kaushansky is a Principal Interaction Designer at Jawbone where she creates rich interactive experiences for Jawbone devices. Karen is formerly of Microsoft/Tellme and is a 14-year-veteran of the speech recognition industry. Over the years, her work has spanned from traditional phone-based speech recognition applications, to voice biometrics, to multimodal experiences.

Now, Karen works with the team at Jawbone to create products and services for the mobile lifestyle unparalleled in their innovation, ease-of-use and sophistication of design. Jawbone is the creator of an award-winning, best-selling line of intelligent Bluetooth headsets (Jawbone ERA & ICON), and of JAMBOX, the first intelligent wireless speaker and speakerphone.

Karen lives in San Francisco with her husband and Goldendoodle Mac, is an ice hockey player and is looking to hire.

Read on for more from this year’s Device Design Day speakers:
Six Questions for Liz Bacon
Six Questions for Mike Kruzeniski, Microsoft
Six Questions for Branko Lukic, NONOBJECT
Six Questions for Cori Schauer, NASA

Kicker Studio: What is the most cherished product in your life? Why?

Karen Kaushansky: I have family heirlooms that I cherish, for example a sterling silver enamel ring passed on from my grandmother. But I interpreted this a little to mean: something I use all the time or can’t live without. I can tell you that I use my good old fashion alarm clock every day. It’s plugged in so I know it will work reliably to wake me up each morning and then it’s one button to turn on the alarm. I know people use their smartphones as alarms but it’s like 4 to 6 steps to turn on the alarm. This device has one, ok maybe two, functions—tell time and wake me up—and it does it really, really well.

I also have a working 8-track cassette player. It’s a great reminder of how, when technology advances, sometimes the user interaction is an afterthought. With a vinyl record, I could choose which song to listen to based on where I put the needle while with the 8-track it’s really hard to go to a particular song.

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

As a dog owner, I wish I had invented those Chuckit! ball launchers. It solves a real problem—avoiding slobbery dirty hands when throwing the ball for your dog, especially when another dog stole your ball.

What’s been really interesting to me are products or devices that change user behavior. One example is the Wii—making family time in the living room active. Recently I started using a Windows Phone 7 which is a very socially oriented phone. The people tile on the main screen shows photos of your contacts, and they are updated constantly. Well I found myself starting to take pictures of my friends just to have them in the rotation. I hadn’t done that before.

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