Interaction Design and the future

I recently got back from Interaction 16, the best conference I’ve yet attended, in Finland. It was a weeklong event spanning many talks involving virtual reality, augmented reality, internet of things, robotics, conversational UI, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and so much more.

It was eye-opening to me as a designer in the same way as that of a fisherman when he discovers that the lake he’s been fishing in all his life is actually connected to a much larger ocean through small streams and rivers. The people I had the good fortune to meet and connect with at the conference are solving design problems on an entirely different level, and at a much more abstract plane of thought.

For example, say we want to improve the user experience of waiting in line at airport security. Most designers would start brainstorming ways to make the user feel like they aren’t waiting but are instead doing something productive with their time. It’s the classic “give them something to do while they wait and they won’t complain” formula. While this is great, experienced interaction designers will approach the problem differently. They will ask — “What can we do to eliminate the waiting lines altogether?”

The solutions that you get from asking that questions will be markedly different. In order to answer that question, quite a few industries and conventional methods of airport interaction must be disrupted and turned on their head. Scanners need to be simpler, people need to be smarter, and the flow of human traffic must be optimized with an entirely different mindset. It’s bold and ambitious, but this is only one of countless problems — each equally or more difficult than this one — that people are trying to solve.

The theme of the conference was what the “future” of interaction design looks like. From what I gathered in my scribbled notes after listening to over forty talks, it sounds like that future involves humanity. And lots of it. Rapidly advancing technology like VR and robotic AI is great, but as we move towards a fully automated world, we start to lose the human element.

There’s a certain flair and affinity to handcrafted products and the time and effort it takes to create something with a unique recipe. Once everything is streamlined and automated, we lose all that. Efforts are being made with AI to add some element of random variation into products and services, but nothing will quite replace actual human beings. We’ve seen the rapid proliferation of automated customer service call numbers, and none of us like it. Do we want the same to happen with brick-and-mortar stores? With coffee shops and restaurants?

Adding a glass ceiling to the level at which AI can function was also a huge theme. One speaker suggested that instead of overloading ourselves with various wristbands that track fitness, sleep, caloric intake, and activity levels, we should move the technology to objects that make more sense.

For instance, have your bed measure your sleep activity. Memory foam can contour and adjust its firmness to your body mass index. Your bed can stiffen up and assist you out of bed in the morning. It can help with getting you a good nights’ sleep. While this sounds great in theory, it’s also important to pose the question “How smart does my bed need to be before I’m afraid to go to sleep at night?”

Giving objects too much control, especially when machine learning and AI is involved, can be extremely problematic. Humans don’t quite know what kind of emergent action will evolve into the machine over time. Science fiction has warned us about this for decades, and we’re now closer than ever to it becoming reality. Designers need to be very careful in how they approach behavioral design of objects, often disguised as robots.

There’s so much more I’d love to share about the incredible things I witnessed at the conference, but I’ll save it for a later post. My biggest takeaway was that we need to control the design of these interconnected objects in the world as they become more ubiquitously ingrained into our lives.

There are many tinkerers and innovators in the world experimenting with technology and making amazing things happen, but there’s little to no designers involved in the conversations around the socioeconomic, human, and political consequences of taking these ideas to market.

If we don’t consciously create the world we want to live in, that world will evolve without our input and insight. And since design is only now coming to be recognized as something that’s invaluable in a product or service from its evolution, it’s going to be an uphill battle — invariably involving lots of politics — for designers to credibly make the leap from screens to the physical world.