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Jacob Kurzrock

Jake is an engineer, designer, and amateur chef who worked as a mechanical engineer before entering the Innovation Design Engineering program. His intention for entering this program was to sharpen his product design skills, but what he learned throughout his studies is that good design doesn’t always require building physical products.


The constraints presented by the pandemic forced him out of a workshop and out of his comfort zone, where he became more familiarized with digital products and services. He believes that design is a means to accessibility, and so his interest and many of his projects are centered around healthcare and education. 


When he is not glued to a computer screen you can find him in the kitchen or cycling around the city.


He is also participating in the EIT Health Wild Card Accelerator as a co-founder of BrightSide, a company focused on developing devices that assist chronic pain patients communicate their state to their loved ones.

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Jacob Kurzrock

Captic is a system that communicates how a joke is verbally spoken to a hard of hearing individual through thoughtfully designed captions and an immersive haptic experience. The captions are enhanced by leveraging typographical elements and added text animations to give words more life, emotion, and meaning. Captic helps viewers feel the audience’s laughter through vibrations, substituting one’s sense of hearing with the sense of touch. 


There are too many limitations with this "online show" therefore I am hosting my project on my own website. Please click the link below for the full experience:

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Launch Project
Click this Image — Stand-up comedians use comic timing and intonations to elicit laughter from the audience and this is done through careful use of inflections, pacing, and pauses to emphasize certain words and often alter the meaning of what is being said. Every comic has their own unique style of speaking and the impact of a joke relies heavily on each comic’s delivery. Through current subtitling efforts by broadcasters and streaming services virtually every comedian’s delivery is homogenized when converted to text.
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Launch Project
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