From humans to beyond humans in 10 years of my career! Still learning...
How has tech design changed in my career as a designer?
P.S. This might also be a self-reflection of me knowing things late or me knowing things ONLY because I have moved to the U.S.
I started with this understanding of HCI (human-computer interaction) and designing systems with the user/human at the center (HCD: Human-centered design) in HCI. That itself was a difficult space to navigate and it took me more than 10 years to become (and many more years to come) a designer for humans. Let’s just say it! Humans are pretty complex, both you and I know about it.
What is it that made UCD natural and habitual for me? My lived experiences, improved sensibilities as a designer, extensive rationalization around design decisions, dealing with multiple design frames, designing for different kinds of users, engaging in different tech domains, getting too attached to the topics of ethics and values, etc. Within HCI, I travelled from mobile/web interfaces to voice and virtual reality interfaces. As if that itself wasn’t enough, I even looked into non-UI designs dealing with touch, gestures, and haptics. Just in the couple of sentences above, I have listed an infinite number of possibilities in the space of HCI.
Coming to the point…
Why did I write this reflection? Because I came across something called the Animal-Computer Interaction. Yes! It is not a new topic, but it is budding. It is a part of the posthumanist design culture that is slowly coming into place. Readers! Focus on the “animal” and “computer” interaction part that I am getting excited about. My mind was blown when I heard people are working in this space because, as a designer, you are not just trying to design for another other complex human being but now you are trying to design for non-humans whom you can only interact with but not completely empathize with. A very big defamiliarization moment! Now imagine, the whole package of various UCD mindsets I have collected for 10 years and that package is completely challenged with this new space. Am I going to create personas of animals? Should we call them “animes”? Let’s not go there, yet!
What if I want to co-design with dogs? Ooo, maybe cats! Wait! How can I do usability testing with fish in a bowl? Maybe I can design a digitally interactive bowl for Nemo? How do I have a conversation with the animals to understand and frame a design problem? Do we need animal cute-paws digital scratch proof surfaces now? How will I know if the animals can understand Or, am I just completely getting this field of Animal-Computer Interaction wrong?
Am I ready to defamiliarize myself? This defamiliarization not only helped me “wonder” about this space, but also question how we look at design methods in different spaces such as HCI, ACI, HRI, etc. Now let’s think about what this does to Human-Robot Interaction. Till now in HCI and ACI, there is still one computer who is trying to get smarter and “human-like.” But, with HRI, we have two personas that have to be tackled at the same time. As if humans themselves weren’t complex, now as a designer, I need to interact with a human-like thing. Sorry robots! I didn't mean to hurt your feelings by calling you a “thing.” You see what is happening to us as designers. We are suddenly these magical beings who are paving the next step to human evolution with chips and microprocessors in the brain. But here, within the space of HRI, we are suddenly thinking of designing for two personas together- the real human and the artificial human. This is different from considering multiple stakeholders involved in a design system, its two users in conversation with each other that we are looking into. Between the two, one’s persona is constantly changing (the robot’s) with respect to the human’s persona. Wait! It’s a “tan” graph (math brain, again!) for ever ending and evolving personas.
I am not cribbing! This is how my excited mind talks--- with a lot of questions which a lot of smart people already thought about. The amount of defamiliarization that designers have to go through from one design to another, from one domain to another, from one context to another---and so on--- is just amazing and that itself is a huge learning of the real world.
