E217 - How will Humanoid Robots Improve your Life?

Welcome to human factors yeah your weekly podcast for human factors psychology and design. Hey what's going on everybody it is episode 217 we're recording this live on 9/2/2021 says human factors casting host Nick Rome I'm joined today across the internet by Mister like OnStar bless the internet Nick how are you Hey man I am good we have got a great show for you tonight I will be talking about Tesla's humanoid robot a bunch of other human factors applications what it means and all that stuff but first we have some programming notes and community updates we'd like you all to be aware of we know you like conference coverage like I should mention last week we're adding a new 1 to our list we have the neuro economics conference of 2021 this is gonna be happening from September 11 to the sixteenth. We've been invited you have coverage but there's more we mentioned all this last week but what we could announce that we have a give away we have a giveaway for a ticket to go 3 lucky winners here. Will be announced on next week's podcast so if you're listening to this in the next week from when we drop it go check it out we have a link in the description of this episode. You know if you're if you're listening or watching now you probably already qualified for a few the entries so go check that out. And I think that's gonna be it for programming notes we have some more exciting announcements coming soon so anyway we know why you're here you're here for human factors news so let's get into it. Yes human factors news this is the part of a show where we talk about human factors news anything related to the field of human factors of their game for us to sit here and talk about it this week like I mentioned we got Tesla is working on some humanoid robots break Blake can you break it down for me. Bravely. I could blink it down for you so Tesla CEO Ilan besides this company is working on a human out humanoid robot and will build a prototype sometime next year so the humanoid robot will leverage tassels experience with automated machines in its factories as well some of the hardware and software that powers the company's autopilot driver assistance software Moscow has spoken repeatedly about his fears of runaway artificial intelligence said the Tesla bought is intended to be friendly but that the company will is designing the machine at 8 mechanical level so that you can run away from it and most likely overpower it it will be 5 feet tall 85 feet 8 inches tall weighing about 100 25 pounds and will have a screen for a face the code name for the bot is optimised and the robot's design will will handle tasks that are unsafe repetitive or boring for humans as the company is written on its website and it's centrally the goal here is that for future physical work now you can have this robot takeover things that may be a repetitive or you should be doing anyway as a human search neck there's a lot to kind of unpack here but I'm really excited because I have always wanted to see a humanoid robot and I'm I'm pretty confident that Tesla is going to kind of follow through on this part specific design but what are your kind of initial thoughts before we dive too deep you think you could take it it's it's a what is it 100 35 pounds 5 foot 8 you think you could take I don't know you sh you sure a graphic earlier about its dead left and I was like ooh that's that's heavy I don't know if I can take the robot is Mr must said that you can yeah so where is to be that came in up in the article but of course it did so look at this this is a catchy headline. Tesla is making humanoid robotics to put into the home. And we understand that. This story on its own does not have a whole lot of merit so we're going to bring in a bunch of human factors application. I'm from. You know human robotic interaction set to help support this article basically cystic tune stay tuned we're gonna we're gonna break down a whole bunch of human factor stuff goodness for you but my general thoughts on this is. That's creepy I want one and like I you know my immediate first thought was it could do the dishes for me and then I thought oh yeah it could pick up you know like the gold goldfish crackers that my families around the you know the place in. And then they could do with a trash and stuff like that the the basically. The physical work that he's talking about here muskies he's saying that there's a bunch of physical work that we do these repetitive tasks that we want to eliminate I'm and so it you know from that perspective I think it's great there's sort of a less obvious application for these types of humanoid robots though. That I think deserves to be talked about and that's something like comfort comfort companionship. Potentially depending on the A. I. that's on board assistance for children elderly autistic folks handicapped individuals there's a lot of things that you know maybe. US as privileged individuals may not think about right away where this could make a huge difference in people's lives and I think that's always cool to highlight. I'm. What what are your initial thoughts on this bike I wanna get your thoughts before I get to social bots sure yeah so one thing that I find really interesting I hadn't I hadn't really gone through and followed all of Tesla or all of you on must kind of like projects he worked on the maybe didn't pan out so there's a bunch that are listed in this article across the board but I I am like I said at the end of the intro I'm kind of confident that this will be something that will we will see even if it's you know later than a year from now because I think there's a lot of utility in the industry side of it for the company itself using robots inside of their actual factories helping reduce some of the kind of monotonous tasks a lot of people maybe have to do or making things safer especially because this thing can you know dead left to a certain way to lift things may be heavier than are safer for humans well exoskeletons so there's a there's a cool impact to industry itself that I think could really be awesome in addition to what you're talking about so there's a really great aspect of having baby another companion in the house let's see if you live by yourself or if you're an elderly person. But the biggest thing for me and cove it has really allowed me to really see how much of time I can save by not doing tasks are automating tasks and I think this is another step forward in that like doing things like not having to drive to work every day back and forth saves gas saves time allowed me to work 2 jobs simultaneously without like having to worry about train transportation or anything like that and then same thing on top of doing things like ordering groceries to the house. It's just it's freeing up your time that we never know how much we wind up having at the very end right so something like a a robot that can do some of the tasks around the house could be awesome maybe also before you didn't have to do your laundry necessarily or if there were other kind of manual labor tasks that you know pile up throughout the weekend so you end up spending your weekend free time cleaning your entire home so I think there's a lot of potential just easy benefit but there is the the bigger question here's like what's the color how comfortable are we gonna be with this thing in the house. Which I know will talk a little bit about later but it it's exciting because it feels like somewhere between a you know Isaac Asimov film and some science fiction movie but also with I see a lot of utility and a lot of kind of hope and in the technology itself. Yes so I want to I want to get everyone who's watching listening starts today we ask would you let a humanoid robot in your house is it scary and then if you would what tasks would you want to perform this is our social pots and again we post these the day of our at our show so if if you're following us on any of these social platforms. You know you can always reach out to us one highlight berry Kirby's. Response here because I feel like this is really important it goes a long line it kind of opens up the discussion of human robot interaction and what it means to have artificial intelligence in your house berry writes have we already taking the first tentative steps within smart speakers robot vacuums and home automation the next steps of having them combined in a meaningful device is probably quite small the big step could be when we start to have more conversational style type of interaction but as to the question as a gadget geek of course I would if I could do the house so if you could do the household chores then that would be amazing so. You know that the race is some great points here with you know we've kind of already taken the first steps to introducing AI and robots into our home do you have any robots in your home that you can think about off the top of your head I actually don't I have 0 at my house I like because I I was trying to think of do I have anything beyond just like a virtual assistants associated with my phone and no I don't really have anything that's taking care of any chores snowed do you have any there is there anything that you use in your ecosystem yes so I have I have a voice assistant one for me to the main companies and then you know I have. If you think about automated tasking I have a lot of different automated tasks that happen right lights come on at a certain time they go off at a certain time and you know what is the difference between like programming and artificial intelligence and all that stuff we can talk about it but just bringing in more automation and bringing in more it does assistance I think is is a big kind of point here we'll get some more the social bots I will kind of sprinkle them throughout but I did want to talk about use this as a springboard as as more of a human robot interaction perspective we could talk about it through the lens of this test the bot where project optimises as they call it so I'm gonna talk about briefly these 4 categories of human robot interaction maybe we can dig into him if any of them our interest here but it's human supervisory control of robots in the performance of routine tasks this is kind of what I was talking about right we're we're looking at these routine tasks and we're just kind of stepping back and monitoring I'm right these are kind of. Levels of application again so we have that one we have remote control of space airborne terrestrial and undersea undersea vehicles for non routine tasks and hazardous or inaccessible environments so this is more of the remote control robot that will handle these tasks for us so again it's a robot there's not. I'm sort of like more like a I. behind it or anything it's just you controlling this thing but it's still part of human robot interaction and I think it's important because that's kind of what I was talking about with the automated systems in the house. They're not a eyes they're not technically robots but I'm supervising that's the first point us point 3 here automated vehicles in which a human as a passenger including automated highway and rail vehicles and commercial aircraft so now we are kind of getting to that application area where we're kind of relinquishing control to another system and we can talk about the whole like stages of automation but I think that. Zdummyz.it's it's different from human robot interaction it's a whole nother conversation we can have the last one here human robot social interaction including robot devices to provide entertainment teaching comfort and assistant assistance for individuals as they go on to mention some the the. The groups I mentioned earlier children elderly autistic handicapped persons so those are the 4 areas of application anyone that you want that speaks to you Blake you wanna jump in any of these. So they're all kind of an interesting set of concepts that really had to tie it back to. Herbie's point of that have we already started this ball rolling of introducing a bunch of technology that has robotics associated with it in our homes now and how's it gonna like take a step wise function to become an actual robot in your house you're talking to conversational way to control some of these task for you so I feel like right now there's a lot of stuff that we do in terms of routine task in our home that could be you know relegated to some sort of robot the you control whether it's via like an application or even like talking to it be it you know one of the virtual assistants are having like a room buying your house I do think that it's a it's kind of us an interesting place that we step between we moved a point to you and which now you're still like mainly in control but you're just controlling a robot and I'm wondering if that that point number 2 is where a lot of kind of supervisory control starts and that is a I kind of develops and is able to handle more more tasking and we start letting these tell operators handle a lot more vehicles or handle a lot more robots at once and just be kind of monitoring for specific markers or warnings in situations where they need to intervene or the A. I. maybe getting something wrong. But those 2 are kind of I think where we really are at the moment the most I mean I know we do have you know passenger vehicles that do have some automation tied to them we definitely have rails and stuff like that that are tied to automation but I feel like point one into your very much you know almost every day for right now but I would imagine that as time goes on we really will have to think about what is appropriate for the best mode of human human robot interaction versus just human computer interaction because now will stop stop really having to deal so much would like software things that are controlling a robot it'll be more I would imagine having a conversation and trying to you director robot to complete a task regardless of its in your house or if it's something you're controlling a supervisory fashion. Yeah we'll talk about teaching robots and actually we can jump into that just a minute I do want to get to another social part here so Rachel in our discord I got a robot vacuum makes life so much easier his name is mark Zuckerberg so we there's nothing special about for you. Let's talk about teaching robots. I human. Basically can give these instructions to a robot right. I'm specifying how to move when you move what to avoid. But basically this is what we're trying to avoid these on a tent on intended consequences right. You know as sort of these. Advances in computer based speech understand understanding happen. B. there's sort of a. The UBB it becomes easier to take,nd these robots right but again there's this this unintended consequences that can happen right so you can think about human supervisors. I'm. Giving a signal to the robot to do the thing. Right and and basically this would be kind of an extension of. Displays or update models that. You kind of look ahead. At some of these things that are gonna happen so you you kind of understand what the robots intent is going to do and then you say yes go and do it I I think teaching a robot is is an interesting thing because like what if I want a robot to go into goldfish mode I have to teach it what a gold fish is I have to teach it where it's likely to be. More what area I want to pick up the gold fish from I have to teach it where of those goldfish go. And then there's. Training an artificial intelligence system to recognize when a goldfish is in fact a goldfish or it's a toy. You know from from some other set that looks like a goldfish and so what's the level of tolerance there so there's a lot you know and and what if that robot misunderstands one of my son's toys for goldfish and throws it out well then he's going to be upset because you can't find this toy. Because Daddy robot threw it out right so like. There's there's all these things we have to think about and it's it's going to be especially. Interesting I'll say interesting to to consider what these unintended consequences would be in the home. What what do you think about training robots Blake and what kind of like human factors applications we have there. I think it is probably a crass way to put this but I feel like a lot of the problems that may arise from training a robot in the home is a similar to how you feed algorithm data or in machine learning right like it's only as good as the employer providing it and what comes out is gonna be like likely a function of what's being given to the robot itself I think a lot of what's going to be really tough at first iteration of this kind of stuff for integrating into your home is and I'm not an A. I. expert I don't pretend to be but I know that we don't have generalized artificial intelligence you know available open on the market where you can learn from a lot of mistakes very quickly so there will be a lot of you know in terms of your human factors in applications if you think about putting a robot in someone's home so you got it and you have a kid I have it and I have like a dog in a partner you're going to have to go through a period where basically you have to you know take tutorials if you will on how to interact with the robot appropriately so the you do know what,nds to executing you know what to expect it to do and you also know what the limitations of the robot itself is because I I think out front it's going to be much more errors can be kind of unlikely that the robots going to be picking up you know from an A. I. perspective like oh I have to be careful when I walk through the living room that I don't bump into things I think it'll be able to map its environment yes but things like let's say you know if it's bought it'll say was dusting the television and knocked it knocked a plan off of that the table I'm not sure that it's gonna necessarily learned that that was something about an intended consequence at first but by you know having that experience over time you imagine that development of a I and implementation and robots it could learn to avoid you know so haphazard things like that so I could imagine up front things in terms of an unintended consequences are going to be you know things you just don't expect are you can't you know you really can't beta test in a. Private production environment because you never know what everybody's house is going to be like what the environment is and things like that so I think a lot of it's going to be out front trying to figure out what's the easiest way to kind of like with any other app that you download on your phone what's the what's the sweet spot between too much information and an overwhelming the end user and then making sure they feel comfortable and able to use the application would be the same thing with any kind of integration of a robot to your home environment what are the variables you need to understand as an end user and water like the key things you need to know in order to effectively have a relationship with that in your home so I think you know either developing a our applications to kind of let you walk through and experience with the robot can do or you know giving you some kind of companion app that allows you to do that supervisory control could be really helpful but in terms of teaching and I think there's going to be a bit of a gap until we get to the point where a guy is a really. Expansive and more ubiquitous before we really see a whole lot of learning on the job if you will but they'll be a lot of like continually feeding robots different data and trying to understand like how to basically make it very. Customize for your own home in your own experience that you want to have with it right and I mean a lot of that will come I think from the access to the other data sets right I imagine. Somebody puts together a module to dust the TV and. It learns from not just in your household but how other tests the bots learn they learn from each other. And you know eventually human bad but if you think about that way right you have access to all this data you might be able to download routines similar to how you do on one of these voice assistants that other people put together you can do these routines and then they perform them. And then you know kind of extrapolating from that. And the tie back to last week's episode when when thinking about learning right like you maybe you could download some module as a parent is a big cool download some module to have the robot teach using the screen on its face expressive. Like emote Jeez or whatever to teach a a complex topic to my child or you know something like that and you could use this almost like a an education tool for children because you know they they learn better when they're interacting with a live human then. Mmhm. Then you know at a television screen or something but if you have a robot that's able to use a human voice and animated like a human that would be an interesting study to see how exactly you know children understand or or really how people of different ages and abilities learn from robots. And I think that's a that's a key human factors concept that should be explored right any thoughts on education. And I think that's awesome I've won it's not a it's not a fine education but will we walk down that road for a second so I I do think that base we talked about last week we're using VR for those maybe didn't listen to the episode difficult check it out because it was I had a lot of kind of cool visuals associated with that a lot of interesting snarl science behind it but the just being that learning to read virtual reality it provides a little bit of a more exciting learning experience is the biggest takeaway but also could potentially over time provide a way to really have an immersive learning experience too now a lot of that had to do with just the immersive aspects of it being able to see things from different vantage points in the very interactive nature of VR so imagine that like next described in your home teaching you something where you you have to actively have a robot teacher in because these things are very humanoid light you could imagine being able to see something done in real time in front of you and understanding whatever concept you're trying to learn to it's like. At a red mask playing guitar whatever it might be how immersive that could be an epic could also be like Nick said okay cool way for you to B. C. axis different routines are open source software to teach different you know skills maybe to a kid or 2 even yourself. But the one thing that you did bring up that of course my mind immediately goes to is if let's say we are allowing this to be you know something that's open source software you can download routines download whatever you want to you imagine the the amount of data that is likely being collected on your interactions with this specific robot but also some potential vulnerabilities of this basically being another thing is connected to the internet of things so now you've got a humanoid robot that is due to the launch point something you supposedly get overtake but it's a it's a it's essentially another human that you would have to deal with in your house that could protect potentially you know be dangerous in some capacity or another if you was subject to hacking or anything like that all over on you even or you know on a on a cat trips over a cat that it doesn't detect or something you know well let's talk let's talk about fears and and kind of how the integration of these robots might you know come into our daily lives. You know there's a lot of media out there that actually talks about robot takeovers I mean it that's the eagle on hole fear right ends and so. You know it it's it's kind of we're conditioned to think that way when we see robots performing these tasks you see the Alice robots a couple weeks ago doing parkour right all the comments on that were yeah. Well there we're we're screwed so I mean you know you think about what this means for us as a society. Are these are these robots taking our jobs away. Or are they providing more jobs you know constructing them doing the AI behind them. Are they useful assistance enhancing our self worth or are they diminishing our sense of self. Are they improving security or becoming spies these are types of questions that human factors needs to solve and. Mostly and and something I'm really excited about is messaging right like how do we. What like you open this thing up what does a messaging look like from the presentation of opening this up doesn't show up in a box at your door do you pick it up in a factory have it sit in your car on your way home does it talk to you while you're driving home is it just this void in the backseat like all these things getting the device it I colored rice getting the robot into your home. Is going to be an experience and see it to think about this from from the very beginning of buying the thing do you you know the whole that's hand as you walk out the door like I don't know what this looks like do you keep it in a box into you get it home put in the back of truck opened up it says hello my name is bot bot and and you can name it whatever you want and like what is the present what is the first thing that comes out of its mouth when it comes into your home there's a lot of things you have to think about in terms of. Presentation here to get over some of these fears to integrate them appropriately with our lifestyles. And I just find it fascinating I don't know I I'm curious to get your thoughts on that whole. The whole perspective Blake I just imagine this thing you or your order it through whatever means and it just shows up automatically German your house in a Tesla dropped off and knocks on your door introduced itself that's what by version of it's messaging is and how it enters your life. But yeah I mean it's it's really tough right because I think there's a lot of potential scary aspects of it and really going back to you I'm gonna mess this up going back to point to you made kind of like what are some of the the big application areas so thinking about remote control of space airborne terrestrial undersea vehicles for not routine or hazardous tasks. That to me really makes me think of what if we could do military operations with these unmanned vehicles. That you can control for how far but it also leads to the scary point which I which came up from the atlas robot it's come out from the different hound robots like do these things start dissipating in warfare and that that opens a whole different scary can of worms for my perspective because you know. Warren what I was terrible as it is and if we're kind of in integrating and using robots as part of this it just it it doesn't feel like it's going to end a great place for humanity in and of itself what caught pulling it back to just some of the security vulnerabilities that maybe you expose yourself to buy potentially having one of these in your house I think that's a big side of this that has to be thought Peru before you start you know just sending these one off deals to somebody's home because like cyber security as we know across definitely our nation but across the world it's a thing that's relatively hard to kind of address every point like a lot of times you'd the vulnerabilities appear the maybe would've expected or there's just not people with the expertise in every organization to identify them so I think companies like Tesla who hopefully are on that kind of cutting edge of thinking about that and with you know people do poke fun at you on bus for his thoughts about A. I. and it kind of taking over the world but hopefully that's leading itself to creating stuff that. Is safer for you to put in your home and be able to use it and kind of the op the fashion that it's made for which is just making life a little bit simpler and giving you back some time in your life day today. Yes I do wanna I do want to mention that we have been using. An article published by Thomas Sheraton in the human factors and ergonomics journal. And the title of the article is human robot interaction status and challenges when using that for a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about today anyone's interested we'll put the link down below but I do want to bring some key points kind of home to to round out this discussion. And these are from the article here so some of the major human factors research challenges include task analysis so that includes dynamics economics other factors. Teaching the robot and avoidance of unintended consequences like we talked about. We also have considering how both human and the robot have mutual models of each other. The use of robots in education. Coping and and the last 1 here coping with the user culture fears and other value considerations so these are some major human factors research challenges and then there's a couple extra key points here in the article to date except for aviation human factors community has contributed a very small fraction of the human robotics papers in the literature so there's kind of this call to action for more coverage on human robot interaction this with articles published in 2016 I imagine not much has changed since then we've had 2 years of a pandemic and you know. It's only 5 years ago so yes things change but research is slow so think about that so there's a couple other points here essentially all robots for the foreseeable future will be controlled by humans either is telly operators steered by continuous manual movement or as telly robots intermittently monitored and reprogram by human supervisors. He nother point human robot interaction is a rapidly expanding field with a great need for human factors involvement in research and design especially as robots are challenged to undertake more sophisticated tasks like the test the bot wants to. In any case the first 90 percent of replacing humans with robots is much easier than last 10 percent. And then last point here where is the human race is changing very slowly computers and robots are evolving at a very rapid pace therefore specific conclusions about human robot interaction are likely to become invalid in a short time motivation of the human robotic interaction community seems to be more focused on building and demonstrating what works and provoking new ideas than in providing detailed and validated scientific conclusions so we're looking ahead we're not quite you know and now analyzing everything that's there now. Mmhm I'm gonna read a social thought and then we'll get back to you Blake so this one is from our good buddy Matteo Matteo rights thing I gotta I gotta make this a little bigger because I can't see it that might be too big. Here I'll read Kristin's are they waterproof because I hate doing dishes and actually if I could only get to pick one chore I do your yard work I hate bugs I'm gonna pull up Matteo is once you give your thoughts on those key points there Blake. The key points are really interesting so I'm kind of it's it's the last point was really a shocker to me because I I think it does make sense right because as technology is continually evolving everybody is likely trying just to push the bounds of what can be created like as as you get more more machine learning algorithms that work better more or closer to a I. development as robotics get better sleeker easier to use but there is a great point there that a lot of what will need to be thought through as we continue moving forward as we start putting these things out into the world is really understanding the impact they have from a scientific point of view both on probably human cognition interaction but also just like the computing science behind all of it. Yeah great point alright one last social thought here and then we'll go ahead and hammer it home Matteo says definitely cleaning always cleaning today it's a room but tomorrow it's Hey Jeeves the humanization of robots definitely makes the more relatable and less threatening I don't know some might disagree with that assessment. All right like any other closing thoughts on the Tesla bots before we get out of here. Not necessarily but a question for you and then I'll I'll answer it as well okay we took to social thoughts we put it out to the world now would you put this thing in your home yes absolutely I think like I said I want these goldfish cleaned up as efficiently and as quickly as possible. I want the dishes done as quickly as visually as possible I want. The toilet scrubbed as quickly as efficiently as possible I want you know our supplies refilled as quickly and efficiently as possible I want I want to basically just take things out and not put them away and have the robot put them away in the right place so that way I know where to get him what about you Blake would you put this thing in your house I wouldn't put it my house Bailey because I don't live in a house to live in a small apartment and I don't know where you would live I mean would it live on the couch crashing every night I don't know so just because of space limitations I would have to say no now but maybe in the future if I can give it its its own room and all that kind of gets your closet it doesn't need a living space it just needs a player charge up well yeah if we had a closet with the charger I would do it and but one day maybe one day all right well thank you to our patrons for selecting our topic this week and thank you to our friends over at the verge Tesla and of course H. FES for publishing that article by shared an. For a new story this week if you want to follow along join me in office hours every Monday night where I find these news stories and and we do post the links to all these articles in our weekly round ups on our blog and also join us on slack or discord for more discussion on these and to be tuned in for when we do social bots we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be back to see what's going on in the human factors community human factors cast brings you the best in human factors news interviews conference coverage and overall fun conversations into each and every episode we produce but we can't do it without you. The human factors cast network is 100 percent listener supported all the funds are going to running the show come from our listeners our patrons are our priority and we want to ensure we're giving back to you for supporting us pledges start at just $1 per month and include rewards like access to our weekly Q. and a is with the hosts personalized professional reviews and human factors minute patrie on only weekly podcast where the host breakdown unique obscure and interesting human factors topics in just one minute patron rewards are always evolving so stop by Petri on.com slash human factors cast to see what support level may be right for you thank you and remember it depends. Yes huge thank you as always to our patrons and especially our honorary human factors cast staff patrons Michelle Tripp patrons like you keep the show running thank you so much for your continued support if you would become a patron you can certainly do that you have access to human factors minute something that continues to surprise us week to week even even ourselves. I think that we managed to put it together and have some really interesting things to talk about anyway I think it's time we switch gears and get into this next part of the show came. Yes it came from check out what's going on in the community here we're we're searching all over the internet to bring you topics that the community is talking about. So you know what whatever you're watching if you if you find this useful go ahead and give us a like a thumbs up whatever your whatever the thing is that you're watching on right now all right. We have 3 tonight I think we only do 3. I'm Blake do it I think we talk about maybe the first 2 and the last one or maybe the first 3 I'm not sure we'll we'll get there let's see here this first one notes from the user experience sub reddit. This is to be successful in this field do you need to speak more than what is required please read this by bad boy 1245 on the user experience I've read it now really quick off the top of that at the top here you're talking to 2 people on a podcast so of course we're gonna talk more than necessary but let's just do it yeah. They go under right there are some people in my organization I have noticed to go on speaking about a topic more than what's required and take ages to put across their point something that can't be explained or something that can be explained in 2 minutes takes almost 10 minutes to finish honestly it becomes so boring I literally lose track of the topic because of this they go off topic talk about everything and don't come straight to the point regardless of the topic be it a process explanation client presentation team discussions etcetera the weird thing is that the upper management somehow like this as they feel the person is very knowledgeable and knows his or her stuff I on the other hand in completely the opposite hi for the love of god can't seem to go off topic and finish my talks fairly quickly but because of this I'm looked down upon and get called out for it. This is not a rant but I jet was genuinely curious so I've observed this thing in my 3 years of a career as a designer and wanted to know am I in the wrong here and should I potentially speak more or is this something is this actually a problem and you have you encountered it also I personally feel it's rather inefficient but please if I'm doing it wrong please let me know thanks Blake. Let's talk about communication have how long does it take you to communicate something what what's all the other stuff going on. Yes so one thing to consider here is it depends on like your personality and also he purrs and how you process information because I know that I can be pretty long winded it like I of course I do a podcast with Nick and most people that listen to it know that I am long winded but even at work I can be because I sometimes have to be processing thoughts as I am saying them so that's one thing to consider it could be these people that are a little bit more long winded the your their communication style is just different and how they process information this is actually something Elise is really turned me on to you and this could be called what's like a verbal processor or a. In real time processor we're actually talking through the ideas helps to turn light bulbs on for them and they discover things like as they are actively talking so that could just be a communication style thing to get used to but what is maybe a little bit more concerning is the fact that you're experiencing that Hey I feel like I can say the things I need to say in a very short amount of time I feel like it's effective and gets the point across however you feel like you're being looked down upon for it now this could just be happening it could be that some people value more words or more time being taken out more time spent in meetings then they do just the. The meat potatoes of what you're actually saying. But one thing I would encourage you to do it especially if you've observed this summer across many years is maybe talking to some of your peers and trying to understand when you do give these explanations that are related to you whatever it is if it's a presentation of its talking a stand up whatever do you are you really getting the point across effectively for other people does it may be that you don't know your audience well enough and it could be that you're explaining things in a quick. To the point matter with it but you're leaving out details are important for the larger team. Ashley let's say if you're working or quite a cross functional team where everybody doesn't necessarily know the nuances of the product or the portion of the project you're working on could be that you just need to provide more details for your specific audience so long story short or long story long in this case it could be 5 what you're doing but I would definitely talk to other peers people you trust or people that you work with to make sure that what they hear in these different instances is you getting your point across you're just doing it quickly. But also consider the audience of your presenting all this information to the neck what do you have what's your experience here in communication with various people yeah communications really important obviously I'm look I was a kid in school that always got frustrated with the teachers for teaching so slowly tell I realized exactly but Blake was saying is that people learn differently and people absorb information differently and so. I'm. While you might be able to get this very quickly others may not be keyed in to all the intricacies of the topic and so it might take them a little bit more time to understand sort of the context around whatever's being presented. I'm. For me. And this is something that is a good practice no matter where you are when I put together briefs a brief needs to stand alone. Without you know it needs to stand alone when you sent it off somebody should be able to sit down and read through that brief and understand exactly what you're talking about and so. When you do that you provide a lot of context and so when you when you brief those briefs that have all that context in it you need to provide that context verbally and you need to provide several different examples a lot of the time for somebody to understand exactly what you're talking about. Because if you are presenting to stakeholders they might not understand what a usability study is they might not understand exactly what you have done to perform usability study what did it entail right you can say we found this and that's your point but they don't have trust in that point because they haven't gone on that journey with you to understand that hi you did your due diligence you have you know what you're talking about and. I'm. Clearly the E. this is a result of our product and not just your interpretation and I think that's a really important point for human factors practitioners or user experience professionals who are looking to present something to somebody. You are an expert but at the same time you are an advocate for the user so you need to explain to them that all the findings are based on user feedback. And you're just the person that advocating for them and while it might be tempting to say look at all the stuff I know. Look at this here Ristic analysis I performed that's. Not gonna be as powerful as he you know seeing user data that says I hate this product and so showing them how you got to the point where the user is saying I hate this product. Is going to be a lot more effective than just coming out and saying the user take this product. And I think that's probably the most stark example of that but that's kind of what I'm thinking is going on here again without more context not sure. Any other thoughts on that Blake. Yeah I mean essentially what one thing to consider is that because this person specifically mentions of their designer half of the job is storytelling gates it's not so much are you able to do the things and use the tools of communicating the rationale between why what you did is the end result so Nick is absolutely right you've got to realize what the you are an expert and you've got to understand that their fallacies come would be an expert you do things there SO and date at this point the you don't even know to explain them so that could be a large portion of what's happening maybe you're working with diverse people with different backgrounds and like different levels of expertise so you have to really story tell talk about the process and how you got to the end goal versus just coming out and like Nick's example saying products socks user hate it that's the end of Meyer will to use 2 minute check and can't really do that work. Exactly all right let's get into this next one here this one is speaking of design staying plugged in to the design universe this is from an erotic Buddha we had on the show before we've we've had a feature one of their it came from so far also from the user experience of reading here we're looking at. Because I am the only designer at my company I often feel as though I'm not keeping up with the evolution of you X. design or research methods for that matter since were on human factors I guess I follow a bunch of different blogs and listen to podcasts here and there but most of these just discuss methodologies or career advice what do you do to stay plugged in and up to date with design trends in the industry Blake. The bet yes maybe this is alley myself a little too much but it's always good to do this so I think the best way to do anything and stay involved in it is to teach it but for for those who don't know like I've I've had a weird kind of career path like I started off as like a human factors analyst if you will.dabbling into design and then really went all the way as a designer and then moved into you you know functional prototyping and front engineering so Brett the skills pretty vast but the way that I got to be a designer was through teaching I did I was not very good at design of my own I really didn't you don't know where to even go to you know be plugged into the design community or the U. S. community. So teaching through various platforms has been really beneficial to me. And I think ultimately through like design lab and now with 80 P. lest by interacting with people constantly going through coming out of boot camps and they needing advice on getting their careers started or working with people teaching them different things in fig bar whatever it may be that kind of act of mentor ship and teaching has really kept me you know quote unquote plugged into what's going on you X. design because new people that are coming in learning it for the first time to the various programs that I'm a part of they always have questions about something they read on the internet or a bit something they heard on my podcast or talk to their sat in a line and so it forces me to go and do my homework if you will and understand the design trend or the new way to do it a prototyping thing in whatever design tool working and so it's it's really allowed me to stay you know plugged in and much more way than just consuming content because like again throw back to the episode last week that more immersive learning experience which I think teaching really helps you get that experience can just keep you in the loop of everything that's going on in your field or industry and to be kind of excited about it so I don't know I would train mentor other people if you're a little bit more senior or if you got a couple of years experience that can really help you just learn new things about the field that you're in and kind of just constantly keep you on your toes but Nick how do you stay plugged in to you know what's going on in the H. F. world oh man I love it when we have different answers and I think your answer is great I just have a different one so what mine is keeping in touch with people which is kind of your answer but yours is more like get it from a variety of different sources mine is like go to conferences stay up to date with the latest in the field by following individuals or connecting with individuals like you say you're the only designer your company then maybe if you make a connection elsewhere or catch up with some old friends and be like. Hey what are you doing to do X. Y. NZ and that's all conferences are great for is that you get sort of exposed to some of these new methodologies or some of these new trends right I think. From speaking from design right I think there's a lot of things that you can absorb just from using other products you can you know you you start to develop an eye for things like drop shadows or rounded edges or. In other sort of design elements like pastel colors like it you get you sort of start to absorb what other companies are doing. And if you follow the leaders. Mmhm and I I you know that. I take that as you well. There are certain companies that are more ubiquitous than others and they're more permanent sorry they're more a permanent fixture in our lives than others let's put it that way and so they have large teams the dedicated to. Improving. User experience and design and so not not to say that they're right all the time. I'm looking at you the windows I I forget what it was anyway not to save the right up there with the tiles come on. Not to say the right all the time but you know they're they're. Industry leaders and so. Pay attention to what they're doing well often put you at least in the right direction especially because of how ubiquitous these products are. They're gonna be used by many people and so the translation to another product is not going to be that much of a stretch if you follow their example and so you know I I again hate saying beg borrow and steal but. If somebody else has already done it and they've done the research and they shared it at a conference or on their professional platform via Twitter or linked in or whatever then you're probably okay to use that as justification to incorporate that in your design. Any other thoughts on that one Blake the last bit that I would say if you really feel like you want to stay plugged in and on top of what's going on there's no better way to do that I think then we. Creating content around it whether it's a podcast it's Instagram posts it's linked in articles it's a YouTube channel that's a great way to force yourself to have to like look at what other people are doing and then say like why what how is applicable to be in house is applicable in a way for an audience that I want to create so that's another way to kind of stay on top of trends and things like that again it's much more getting into the immersive space to actually show what's going on or what's new in the world yeah I think I think that's all we have time for with it came from I do want to get into this one more thing that needs no introduction it's one more thing for Blake and I talk about one more thing like when you got this week. I got kind of a weird one so today was a it was a it was a big like heavy music awards show and there's a my favorite podcast the guy that does it he was up to win for you know the metal John or whatever any did it was just a really cool experience for me personally as someone who like Kobe this had a lot of weird impacts on my life that I'm starting away to really pinpoint now but one thing was kind of introducing this person and this personality into parts of my life like I don't know the guy I we don't have any kind of actual relationship but there's been a lot of be consuming its content and things like that I'm in learning his life story and it was just really cool to watch somebody who's who a couple years ago felt like they hit rock bottom kind of reinvigorated change their entire life threw away that really only cove it could are provided through canceling all shows and cancelling normal mediums of doing things so is just an interesting kind of experience to be able to share with somebody through twitch through like up a giant audience or whatever. And just made you feel really good that's awesome I don't know yeah Hey how bout you Nick what's going with well hang on you know what if you're listening to this. And you've listened to the show for a long time we've been in your ear holes or on your TV or whatever for a long time I'm and we we want to return the favor reach out say hi well say hi back we're we're pretty approachable so if you had any like Blake where you know we're part of your life in some way we're pretty approachable join our communities you know that's always a good way to kind of get into the the whole thing I don't know that's it is weird right when you think talk to somebody who's on a podcast because you're like I know so much about you but you know nothing about me. Yeah it's really strange what do you say it's it but it's the strangest dynamic ever but it's it's cool it's I've learned a lot and it's a it's a fun way to interact with people across the internet yeah all right so my one more thing is this platform called to gather and this is a virtual meeting software this is what the neuro economics conference is going to be using for their virtual venue and. I will show video of this in the post show up like I know you got to run but I will show video this in the post show because it's so cool but basically it's like if you took an 8 bit video game and designed a conference center around this video game. You can actually walk around and interact with elements in the environment. You can. What's the word I'm looking for you can basically. Interact with other people in the environment you can. Enter a interactive posters in the environment and it looks like an 8 bit video game I wish I could pull it up for you I'm trying right now but it's not working so well maybe maybe we'll show it later there it is so for everyone listening I'll try my best to describe what's going on here but I am at a virtual conference right now and I'm actually walking around you know with my little avatar this is the venue for the neuro economics conference and you can go into like poster sessions here and look at individual poster sessions and presumably watch like a video of somebody performing at. But I just thought it was it was such a neat little thing I was geeking out so much about this to our lab that you know I just I I loved it so much I had to I had to like give it to gather because it's really cool and if you want a chance to go to this so you can actually experience gather yourself if you go to the near our economics conference you can actually experience the venue before it starts you can go check it out. But again if you want that chance to win you can you can certainly enter the contest again that. That giveaway will be linked in the description of this episode and I would have said it without the give away but it's just it's an awesome it's it's awesome I was geeking out so much about this thing it's so cool. Yeah that is amazing take on the virtual experience for a conference for beat up so whatever they end up using everything gathered us that's so so cool I'm so excited to attend 8 bit top down MMO at a conference it's it's let's go that's exactly what it is. All right let's take it home that's it for today everyone let us know what you guys think of the story this week are you gonna put it that's about your home let us know down in the comments you can always hang out with us on slack discord get to us on any of our social channels visit our official website sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with all the latest human factors news like what you hear you wanna support the show you can do a couple things to support one of the 5 star review. I can tell your friends about us that's another thing you can do consider supporting us on Patreon that always helps the show grow and use more advanced technology to get the human factors work out there as always links to all of our socials or website and the giveaway are gonna be in the description of this episode I don't think Mr Blake OnStar for being on the show today where can our listeners going find you if they wanna fight about out about clearing out the closet for their own tests will buy. If you guys want to join me in the clearing out your closet revolution for Tesla bots you can always find me across social media and don't panic you acts or in the human factors caste discord or slack at Blake as for me I've been your host Nick Rome you can find the streaming on twitch every Monday night at 4:00 PM for my office hours across social media at Nick _ Rome thanks again for tuning and human factors cast until next time. If the pain is.