Robotics : A Future Design Thinking Perspective
Since the pioneering work by Douglas Englebart onwards, the drive to humanise technology has focused on reducing the gaps between people and machines. Before GUI or even compilers, reducing the interface to a minimum made sense. Universal usability is not only a technical achievement in making advanced computing operable by anyone but is a moral one too. The onward march of simplicity, however is reaching a point of inflection.
The pace of change is rapid and what was once science fiction is becoming realised much sooner than we thought and maybe were comfortable with. Drones, driverless cars, and machines with human like intelligence are literally starting to change our experience of the world. Many people fear that these technologies could easily switch from server to dominator as no one reliably knows what is going to happen.
Many see the changes brought by automation as a fundamental change and positive liberation from physical drudgery. Conversely, the dystopian view that technology, linked with commercial gain and outside of the control the public is scary. The present does little to assuage the nervous, events in the real world seem to signpost a more fragmented, polarised and uncertain future than ever before.
When smart devices, ones that embed computing power into everyday life and products through seamless often highly engaging experiences, a corner has turned where ethics and design became more tightly connected than ever before. Beyond affordance, we are potentially all ‘scripted’ in our behaviours with smart devices. Without complicit intention or plan and within a commercial context, we are thus potentially the products of a determined but unmapped kind of social engineering. When our lives mediated are by technology we change. We know this through neuroscience and the way we develop — what we do literally programs our on-board computer and hardware — the mind and body.
Making sure this change is likely (we cannot prescribe outcomes between design and everyday life) to engender good thus becomes a more critical goal than simplicity. For design this means that we should be designing products and services that support people in the context of a highly technologized lived experience. And this goes beyond the technology ‘platform’ for interaction — we tend to focus on what we think might be the next ui thing of no-thing. Instead of focusing on how interaction might shift from visual to conversational paradigms, we should instead be thinking about touch, web, smart-bot or embedded as just modalities of the same principle — our interaction with intelligent machines. And it is that underlying interaction (what we used to call HCI) is what we should focus on.
This is a very different design agenda than we have right now and goes against many or most of the approaches that currently influence how we create digital products and services. Service Design is very clear in its purpose to provide seamless experiences across devices, touchpoints and even human agents. In this new situation of needing to support people’s autonomy in a highly ‘serviced’ world, seamlessness starts to look like a negative. Critical Design and the related area of Speculative Design would seem to offer a better approach. In using prototypes to question the near future. Unfortunately, these two strands in contemporary design are (partly by design — sic) somewhat dislocated from commercial product design and lived mass consumption.
So, what are the currents in design that offer the most potential in this new role of safeguarding people with technology? Well, Co-Design for certain in facilitating designing with people. Design Anthropology, for certain in its connectedness to the lived present and emergent future. Open Design, for certain as it empowers people with the tools of creativity and lastly, Ethical Design would seem to have more relevance now than since the technological revolution that bought about industrial production methods.
So, what would a design approach that would help look like? Well, let’s with a humanistic theory to build it out of studies in neuroscience that show how the brain learns and changes in response to experience — including our interaction with technology. We also know that we are not just cognitive machines that work through some endless, mutable neural network. Indeed, our physicality and how we move and combine thought and act subtly changes who we are, what we think and how we interact with stuff and people. So, what does all this practically mean for design? What are the principles that might lie behind such a new domain?
Some Provisional Post-smart Design Principles:
1. BREAK FLOW
Interactions that disrupt us out of negative flow experiences
2. EMPHASISE EDGES
Interactions that accentuate the borders between virtual and real
3. CHOICE IN PROCESS
Interactions that enable us to choose how we work together with machines
4. ARTIFICIAL UI
Interactions that emphasize the non-humanness of machines
5. SMART SERENDIPITY
Providing insights into the stuff we (as humans) might not know/think of
©John Knight, 2017
