Exploring where digital meets physical. Prev designing spatial computing @Snap, @magicleap, architecture + physical buildings.
Los Angeles, CA
Joined June 2008
- Tweets608
- Following5.4K
- Followers1.2K
- Likes17.8K
Character is the UX for home robots. Behaviors, personality, sounds, motions all define the human-robot interaction loop. Cheers to Ros and team for forging this rich vision!
We will soon have robots in our homes. Robots with arms and legs that move through our homes like no technology has in the past.
I started @roboticscorp with the view that we should be building robots that people actually want to live with.
A home robot should be capable and it should be understandable. It should meet us where we are. And it should be a delight to live with.
All of this starts with character: engineering character into a robot means delivering a consistent experience and an understandable product. And, if done correctly, allows users to operate within existing relational paradigms. The character can be nice to have around, too.
My hope is that when you meet Voxel, he already feels somehow familiar.
Karen retweeted
jnr saas designers confidently telling me you should just delete affordances from mass market consumer apps so that they look nicer...
everyone should - at least once in their career - sit in a room with 'average' users and watch them try and do *anything at all*
Karen retweeted
When you go talk to users, don't (just) ask them what features they want. Ask them what problems they have. In the best case this will lead you to think of features they'll love but would never have thought to ask for. And expect to go through multiple cycles of ask-and-build.
Huge opportunity to explore more materiality in robots. What do we actually want to surround ourselves with in our homes? What if this could feel more tactile, more warm, less medical clinic? I bet there's an iPhone moment here soon moving away from plastic shells....
Karen retweeted
Augmented Reality is the natural interface for robotics.
Not only for giving commands, but also to visualise hardware data (like LiDAR) natively in 3D.
@specs AR glasses, @UnitreeRobotics Go2 Lite quadruped, @dimensionalos OS for the robot
Smart glasses surveillance anxieties can be better managed! With broader systems coordination... what if Google Places owners could remove themselves from capturable areas? Google could geofence and block capture within sensitive locations: courts, bars, clinics etc
The core technology exists (camera glasses) but not yet the corresponding permissions infrastructure. This can be a 2-way street! But is currently a 1-way without any input from bystanders. This loss of control/consent understandably feeds the larger negative social reception
Karen retweeted
It’s now 2026. We’re all watching AI spit out infinite variations from a single prompt. Georg Nees was doing the exact same thing in 1965, with punch tape, a plotter pen, and mathematical algorithms. He proved something timeless: true creativity doesn’t require breaking the rules. It can emerge from strict rules + a little controlled chaos /4
Karen retweeted
contrarian take: the internet’s first reaction to something new is almost always wrong
- people hate on new designs then become the biggest fans (i.e. airpods max, cybertrucks)
- meta raybans functionality is primarily for photos and videos
- wearables are going to look different on everyone so focusing on flattering one person (even the ceo) doesn’t make sense
- sometimes you need to sit with something and let it cook (i.e. taylor swift albums after the first listen)
also it’s usually the same people who come back when something’s hot and say they were always day ones
Karen retweeted
VR did not fail. It graduated. Every roboticist I know is building on top of tech that VR paid to invent. The arc only looks linear in retrospect.
Just did @lennysan's podcast on why we're at the beginning of the AI hardware boom. 1/
