Inside an adjacent office, three engineers hunch over computers in a room that looks as if a Jiffy Lube had been locked in captivity with a RadioShack and forced to breed. The men sit at cluttered desks that surround a red, late-model Jeep Wrangler with dozens of big, bulbous sensors and metal grids. Circuit boards, wires, and bizarre gadgets protrude from the car’s doors, bumpers, and roll bars. So how does a self-driving car follow Kind Tech’s central tenet—enhancing humans without replacing them? Think of those elderly drivers again. Give them a choice—besides public transportation—and you might enable them to live a longer, happier, and more fulfilling life at home. Drivers are already benefiting in smaller, practical ways from the NavLab’s research—at least in the ideas department. Many years ago, a crew there worked on a car that could parallel park itself. That feature recently became available on the Lexus LS.

The feature points out another element of tech kindness: enablement. Machines should do more than merely improve our “productivity”; they should make us more capable. They should do things we don’t like, or help us do things we can’t, such as parallel park—or hit on the barista at Starbucks—all the while alleviating the anxiety and tension that would otherwise result from the experience. The upshot? A world completely free of cold sweats.

IMAGINE going for a jog in the park one morning when you see a group of people in the midst of a soccer game. You’d like to join in, but you don’t know anyone on the field. Do you bravely call out to the first person who sprints past? Do you shuffle awkwardly on the sidelines and hope someone notices you? Or do you simply check your mobile device to see if anyone needs a sub? One thing that John Zimmerman and his team noticed was that groups of people often lack a way to advertise availability. They came up with a concept that gives outsiders a way to join in without running the socially awkward risk of rejection. As always, necessity—or at least awkwardness—was the mother of invention.

Perhaps fittingly, Zimmerman does not look like your average Carnegie Mellon professor. Unlike most of the paunchy, bearded, and semi-distracted men you typically see wandering the halls, Zimmerman is tall and clean-shaven, rail-thin with buzzed, graying hair, and dressed head-to-toe in black. He reminds me a little of Steve Jobs when, appropriately, he pulls out his iPhone and sets it on the table of his cluttered office. Zimmerman holds a joint appointment in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the School of Design. The university is all about interdisciplinary synergy. When the engineers designed Tank, for example, they invited the drama department to supply the details—expanding Tank’s character, adding depth to his backstory, and scripting witty dialogue.

But the teamwork goes way beyond flat-screen roboceptionists. Take grocery store scanners. “These were about making a quick, efficient transaction,” Zimmerman says. “But it’s socially dehumanizing to the person working it. Now I am the thing that orients the bar code. I serve the machine, as opposed to the machine serving me.”

The basic idea is to improve on the kind of future depicted in The Jetsons. How do we take George’s job—a professional button pusher, really—and enhance it in a way that would leave him feeling fulfilled at the end of the day? Since Hanna-Barbera didn’t explore this territory in the cartoon, that task falls to researchers like Zimmerman. He takes the job seriously.

“People fear that tech is replacing and not enhancing us,” Zimmerman says. “The question is, how do we use technology to make ourselves better, while still gaining that sense of efficiency?”

While Zimmerman has yet to solve George’s crisis, he has a few other ideas on how to meet those challenges. He started working two years ago on an alarm clock with a twist: It helps your kids go back to sleep instead of blasting them out of their sheets. The clock looks a little like a puppet theater that uses visual cues of the sky to help kids know when they should be sleeping and when it’s OK to get up. When it displays a sun, the kids can roam free. When it shows the moon, they have to stay put. Kids can also select the music that will wake them up, so be prepared for a morning serenade from the Jonas Brothers. If the clock allows parents to get a full night of uninterrupted sleep, the thinking goes, they’ll have more energy and patience to deal with the morning rush when kids need the most attention. That, in turn, will make them better parents—or at least make them feel that way.

By studying the needs of parents, Zimmerman and his team also came up with the idea for a soccer equipment bag that can tell users what’s missing and what needs to be taken out. His original design had parents in mind—they felt bad when they sent their kids off without items—but the parents themselves saw a better opportunity: to have their kids use it. “They felt it would help teach them how to pack,” Zimmerman says. Putting kids in control came with a positive-reinforcement angle: Parents would know when a kid actually picked up after himself. Instead of yelling about messy rooms and forgotten gear, moms and dads could catch their kid doing good—tech at its kindest.

“Most of the time, we punish bad behavior, but rewarding the good behavior is a much greater motivator,” Zimmerman says. “Parents feel better when they praise their kids than when they punish them. We want to make tech that supports social interactions that people desire to have, not just remind them of the things they want or need to do.”

Researchers found other surprises when they introduced more inventions to families. Anind Dey, an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, often noticed a disconnect between what parents demanded and what they actually needed. “Parents told us off the bat that they wanted a system to help kids get dressed in the morning. So we worked up a prototype using animations to help them,” Dey says. “Uniformly, parents hated the system. They told us, ‘As much as I hate arguing with my kids, I enjoy the time I spend with them.’” In other words, parents want help, but they still want to feel like parents. Enhance us, but don’t put us out of a job. “You don’t build on what people say their needs are, but on what you observe their needs are,” Dey says, noting that at least a year of field research goes into the group’s inventions before they move into development.

Another scenario: Dey assumed that most families would like to have some form of automated cooking assistant, a computer that could read a recipe and mix the ingredients. “It turned out they didn’t want that, either,” Dey says. “It was important for families to demonstrate how they provide for their kids by physically engaging themselves in that activity.” The eggs-in-the-cake-mix factor still applied. “So the technological solution became, how do we help them automate their grocery shopping list? That way, we didn’t take away the things that added to their lives, but we made something they didn’t enjoy doing easier.”

People don’t care to feel superfluous, but many seem to be able to tolerate a large dose of intrusive technology. Two years ago, Dey intentionally thought up a product that crossed the line. Something that would let him know precisely where technology stopped being kind and became intrusive. He designed a smart home that interacted with its owners. A lot. “When you got home from work, it would tell you, ‘Great job at work today. I’m going to draw you a hot bath. Why don’t you relax?’” Dey says. He intended to give owners a case of the creeps. Who wants an obsequious, disembodied personality with no actual knowledge of what you did that day? Wrong again. “They loved it,” he says. “Kids never tell Mom or Dad that they do a great job, but even as adults it turns out that we still crave that kind of validation, even if it comes not from a boss or parent, but from a machine. That just blew us away.”

If people actually like being flattered by their software, then getting virtual love from the aforementioned Hug seems less outlandish. Carnegie Mellon professor Jodi Forlizzi first introduced the concept in 2004. You can even call someone’s Hug and leave a “message”—the pillow can store up to four “hugs” along with a voice message for a few hours. Forlizzi says she had older people in mind, particularly those who live far away and want to maintain a physical connection with their families. In four years, though, no manufacturers have tried to market her invention. Hugs are no substitute for hopping on a plane.

Meanwhile, John Zimmerman and colleagues are exploring Kind Tech in a more profound way. In a corner of his office, he has covered a giant whiteboard with images of sports cars, designer clothes, cell phones, and video game consoles from a project he oversaw two years ago. Students e-mailed him every week with photos of things they wanted. By the end of the semester, the images had changed. Instead of the usual gadgets, he received pictures that represented sleep, or a bike to ride around campus, or homecooked meals—not the means to comfort or happiness, but the ends themselves.

“We used that information to identify seven transitional phases that college students go through,” Zimmerman says. “Then we thought about how to design a product that supports this process.” The students have yet to get the hang of the idea entirely. One of the more innovative creations, an electronic widget called MetaMe, displays various manifestations of your personality depending on where you are in the moment.

The health and fitness industries stand to benefit especially from Carnegie Mellon’s developments in Kind Tech. In another experiment, Dey and his team of researchers recently set out to see how they could use GPS technology and artificial intelligence to help obese people slim down.

“The options out there were not very good,” Dey says. “You can wear a pedometer, but that’s not going to help if you don’t know how to interpret the data. You can go to a trainer, but it’s expensive, and we found that people who are out of shape feel very stigmatized at the gym.” As a solution, Dey imbedded an accelerometer—a gizmo that measures acceleration—into a Nokia 5500 phone. The combo of the phone and a separate GPS unit helped people track the number of steps they took every day and where they took most of them. “We wanted to answer the question, ‘What am I doing when I get most exercise, who am I with, and where am I when I do it?’ If you are behind on your goal for the day by a certain hour, then you’ll know exactly what you need to do to get back on track.” Eventually, Dey sees the unit using the GPS technology to recommend specific walking routes and other alternatives based on your location, providing the same kind of real-time feedback that you would get from a trainer, including calorie-burning figures, but at a fraction of the cost.

The group followed the same line of thinking when they developed a prototype for an electronic tablet to help Alzheimer’s patients. They knew the demand existed: Caregivers cost a fortune, and repetitive questions from sufferers can inspire teeth-grinding in even the most patient relatives. So they paired a time-lapse camera that took a picture every 30 seconds and recorded audio to go with the image. “You can easily lose your sense of self if you forget short-term events,” Dey says. “So we asked what cues you would need to recall details of a particular event. In a wedding, the most common kind of cue is the people you meet. So we filtered them through a small tablet device that patients can carry around with them and play back at critical moments.”

With Kind Tech, we will get better—not just healthier, necessarily, but more capable. As Zimmerman says, “We want to make technology that functions not like a spell checker, which is simply about preventing a mistake, but like a spell checker that would teach you to be a better speller.” In other words, if traditional tech was the treatment for our ills, Kind Technology may be the cure. “We talk about progress in the tech industry, but there’s no talk about what we’re progressing towards,” he says. “We always think about our current state, but can we articulate the state we’re going to? I think that’s part of the struggle that we have to have in the tech community.”
A big part of that struggle will happen outside of the insular world of academia where professors get paid to dream. Maybe you won’t be overnighting a Hug to your gramps anytime soon. But the scientists’ chief product is not the inventions. Carnegie Mellon and similar schools are inventor factories. They generate students who go on to think big for Apple, Microsoft, and other industry giants. After helping create snooze clocks and roboceptionists, the students may create human-enabling innovations beyond the imagination even of their profs.
How kind.

Mike Darling is the associate editor of Spirit.

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