The human connection

But cubicles do not make for isolation: despite the honeycomb of walls, Nortel staff constantly chat with each other in meeting rooms, coffee klatches, the cafeterias and staff luncheons.

Michael Kurtz's cubicle is easily distinguished. A huge potted plant sits on top of his filing cabinet like a big green flag marking his territory. His home away from home is anything but plain and characterizes the creative nature of his work. Two red plastic bean bag chairs fight for space in the corner. His fabric wall dividers are lined with bold little posters, which he has designed and produced to advertise his inventions under his own brand name, Widgetworks. Parts, pieces and products that he has devised, is thinking of building or had a hand in creating are piled on shelves all around.

In fact, Mr. Kurtz has gone one wild step farther. He's created his own internal web site for staff to take a gander at what he's been up to. "Graphic arts is one of my strengths and one of my real joys anyhow. I try to make everything I do visible and make it relate to product experience. If I say I produce the best phone in the world but put it in a plain brown paper box and I didn't tell anyone else, it doesn't do anyone any good.

"So as part of getting excitement and creating a brand or getting some equity around a project, why not create a commercial web site for your projects and pretend it's a web site out there trying to make money? People can go to it and it explains what the project is."

He started off in industrial design, the creative art of devising tools and equipment, making them easier to handle and understand. Now as an interaction designer, the job is focused more exclusively on how humans can relate to those tools and equipment.

In its simplest form, his predecessors decades ago would have figured out how to arrange the numbers on a telephone key pad or in recent years to enlarge the numbers and keys so people with poor vision or severe arthritis can easily press the buttons.

Nortel's design teams work with engineering and other groups the way a construction crew works with electricians, plumbers, carpenters and architects in assembling a large building.

One current project is called a transaction centre, aimed at providing remote sales and service. The idea would be a step up from a call centre. If a customer wanted to order flowers, for example, he or she could use any combination of e-mail, telephone messaging, telephone conversation, electronic commerce and probably other Internet activities that aren't even in use yet.

"There are also a few of us who are trying to look a few years farther out and trying to establish a vision of what a transaction centre could be five years from now when video on-line is available and you can custom-build products on line while talking to an agent."

The team tries to look ahead by designing the equivalent of a set on a science-fiction TV show or a theme park ride and then trying to figure how best to work with the futuristic tools.

Mr. Kurtz started working with Nortel as a university student, with assignments as simple as designing labels for switching equipment.

"What put me where I am today is fortuitous timing. I've always had an interest in technology, but never to the point where I became a programmer in high school. I felt it was neat to create things but not necessarily to get into the bowels of it and understand how bits and bytes work."

A native of Calgary, where he acquired his love of downhill skiing, he began to pursue fine arts and came to the industrial design program at Carleton University. "I was originally planning on going into architecture and didn't know anything about industrial design." At the time, Carleton was the only university offering an industrial design specialty.

He arrived at Nortel in 1989 as a summer hire for the Corporate Design Group, which insiders call the CDG.

"Definitely in Canada and arguably in the United States, it's probably one of the top design groups to work for. There are not a lot of large corporate design groups around. There are smaller consultancies, but in terms of a corporate group, they're one of the few around. It's one of the best É"

He says his introduction was on the scary side. "They are very good and kind of chuck you right into the deep end. The very first product was a base station for small mobile phones -- they look like grey butterflies. As fate would have it, it turned out they manufactured I don't know many of them. That was really gratifying as a designer to see your work come out the other end. As a student, it was mind blowing."

He continued at Nortel as a part-time, temporary employee. "I spent periods of time going through my last year of school supplementing my income by designing labels for some of the designers here. That was nice."

He wasn't hired immediately on graduation but continued doing contract work. Mr. Kurtz had set his sights on a graduate degree in England to study ergonomics. Nortel, it turned out, decided to help sponsor his master's of science at Loughborough University. The company had another Corporate Design Group at Harlow, England. So Mr. Kurtz had the opportunity to do his thesis without breaking off work with the CDG.

"I learned a lot about the one thing in ergonomics that I hadn't been exposed to -- kinematics, measuring of the human form and the environment. It also introduced me to cognitive ergonomics and in particular, my thesis work introduced me to the area of the social influences of technology and how people react to technology."

In studying how people relate to technology, Mr. Kurtz learned early on what thousands of children experience daily with their Furbies, talking dolls and other animated toys.

"People react to technology as though technology had a personality and character. If you are typing along and you type something wrong and you lose something or your computer crashes, the first thing you say is, 'you stupid machine,' and you hit it. Now that is an example of anthropomorphism -- giving human characteristics to non-human things."

He had a hand in designing a telephone handset with a voice-activated dialer and a voice that reads back messages. "The interesting thing is, the most powerful trigger for that happens to be speech. If you have to talk to something or it talks back to you, that will invoke the strongest reactions. It happens unconsciously É that's how our brains are wired.

"When this project came along, I thought here is an example of a product that has all those attributes. This led to the creation of this job area called interaction design.

"The premise of this area would be to look at the whole product experience, which is to say that the way that people build a relationship and react with a product is greater than the sum of the parts of the plastic casing and all the steps to make the phone call.

"The sum of these plus all the social interaction has an enormous impact on people reacting to the product. It will help us understand influencing factors and should make us design better products for people."

In England, Mr. Kurtz acquired an education of another sort. "While I was in the U.K. in the mid-'90s, that was when the Internet really exploded. I was able to watch this thing evolve into a rich, amazing technology. My knowledge of it, how it worked and how to design and create for it, evolved along with it. That is a great advantage for me."

Another aspect to his job involves dreaming up and figuring out how to build new gadgets. Some were turned into functional products, some are prototypes and others are still in the works. The posters around his cubicle advertise some of them.

"An effective way to get people excited and share ideas is with posters," he says, adding that inventing a widget is only half the fun. "It's even more interesting if more people know about it. So doing posters and making little brochures is all part of getting hold of that product experience."

Here are some of his projects:

Butterflies: Small base stations that resemble butterflies for low-powered hand sets. These are mounted on the ceiling along the hallways of Nortel's buildings.

Wigglemouse: a custom mouse with a motor that vibrates when e-mail arrives, not yet completed.

Tiny Bubbles: A tube that fills with bubbles to signal the number of e-mail messages, not yet completed. "The tube is meant to stand above the monitor so if I am 50 feet away I can see the bubbles."

Soundwear: A vest with a battery pack and wearable cellular telephone. Speakers are in the shoulders, receiver/transmit is voice activated so emergency crews in any situation from Hydro to ambulance can communicate without having to handle a telephone and work at the same time. "I designed the pieces, the vest and how it goes together." After an evaluation, it is not considered viable and ready for the market -- for now.

"One of the great things about working here is that the success of a project does not only depend on having a product on the market at the end of the day. So if you work through a project, the learning acquired through the process of the project is valuable itself. You have no fear of making mistakes, there are no stupid ideas. That kind of attitude comes right down from the top."

Michael Kurtz When joined: 1993 Division: Corporate services Hot project: As interaction designer, designs innovative ways that people will relate to new technology. He is working on a transactional centre, a product aimed at providing remote sales and service. Off the job: Graphic arts design, skiing, cycling. Quote: "Wireless technology is going to become extremely huge. When technology becomes invisible, it becomes magic. É We are developing to the point where things can happen around us without us doing anything about it, such as walking into a room and the lights go on, then your favourite music comes on. All this might make people feel paranoid, or they will love it, we'll have to see. "

Copyright 1999 Ottawa Citizen