An Argentine at Interaction 23: Thoughts on our Role and the Future’s Design
Every time I attended an IxDA conference; I was left with much more knowledge than the one the talks had to offer. These events usually come with two learning moments for me: the A-side (immediate knowledge; what I learn from each talk in particular), and the B-side (that knowledge that you do not learn right away, but that instead arises from subsequent reflection upon the combination of the talks with the people I met, the assembly of the event and, of course, my personal learning experience).
Interaction is an event that takes place once a year across the world, and in which, for 5 days in a row, there are talks, workshops and debates that revolve around a specific topic of interaction design.
Interaction 23 took place in Zurich, Switzerland, and it was framed under the title “Design the Undefined.” It was a hybrid event which enabled both on-site and live virtual participation for those who could not actually attend the event. To measure the event’s extent, this year, 890 people attended on-site and 275 online, and 49 countries took part in it with 73 volunteers and 77 speakers.
Design the Undefined allowed us to combine interaction design with robots, the planet, human connections, organizations, and cyborgs, thus showing us that we can be agents of change.
The event provided much food for thought, especially with the viewpoints introduced from the many cases presented, since they invited us to re-think what we know and to consider our role from the different complex contexts we live in, and to add to them the dizziness provoked by the changes in the planet, the new labor relations’ systems and the human-technology relationship that is challenging people’s common values and regular behaviors.
I highlight something that made this approach more interesting: the knowledge and cases presented came from different continents, cultures, and languages, and they were focused on both physical and digital design: on conversational, metaverse, analogical and IA solutions. Throughout the event, the organization showed an interest in creating a conference that was open to diversity in different aspects.
A-SIDE
I would like to start by sharing a summary of the event and reviewing some of the talks that kept echoing in my mind.
Undesign the Defined
There were talks that suggested undesigning the defined, such as Brenda Laurel’s keynote, which revealed that, by making a good use of technology and our design abilities, we can help reverse the negative impact of human intervention on the planet. She inspired us with true stories and invited us to design interactions in scenarios where there was human intervention, but, this time, with a different focus. Instead, the attention switched to the impact on nature in a scenario in which nature itself was in touch with the community, thus leaving the idea of digital products behind.
In turn, Lasse Underbjerg proposed that we implement a framework that uses AI to help us keep an open mind and design inclusive futures that are based on complexities and diversities and that embrace the uncertain. Digitalization, automation, climate change and the pandemic showed us that nothing is static or has a single way of being. Therefore, our way of thinking and designing should not be like that either.
Ethics and thoughts on the use we are giving to technology, especially to AI, were key elements to the conference. The different cases and insights exposed were examples of good practices and acted as warnings of scenarios in which we may not be aware that technology and/or the lack of conscious design are causing discomfort in people.
Design the Undefined
Furthermore, we realized that our role allows us to design in new scenarios. Jason Edward Lewis, in his talk “Future Imaginaries of Abundant Intelligences,” showed us how to include the indigenous community in the creation of narratives that revalue their history and beliefs, and therefore create future scenarios with a non-colonized/colonizing point of view.
Samuel Huber’s exhibition suggested putting the planet at the center of design to prototype solutions that do not exhaust resources. In his presentation, he presented a framework and good practices to start implementing this approach in our projects.
In addition, there was a segment devoted to new ways of working and ways to collaborate, in which I and two other speakers (Tiia Leppanen and Jack Holmes) presented the theme and specific cases in which we participated. I talked about “XD Role in Work Experience Design,” and I explained what we were doing at Flux IT and reflected upon the fundamental role of Designers to help organizations orchestrate authentic solutions that connect with people. One of the keys to the project was the incorporation of a new work mindset: Total Experience (TX). I promise to write some content about this in the future!
To sum up this day, and as the title anticipates it, I got to envision the many ways and the many different scenarios in which we can exercise our role. We can work for specific communities and revalue their history; we can provide consulting services for organizations to improve work experiences; and we must think of ourselves from a holistic point of view, thus designing for people while going a step further from our people-centered viewpoint and taking into consideration the impact we have on the place we live in.
The question that kept echoing in my mind was: in which other areas can our design viewpoint be useful?
Outlook to the Future
The last day of the conference was to look to the future. The talks focused a lot on the intersection between technology and ethics to design responsibly and they showed the two sides of the same coin: cases in which AI and other technologies had negative results, and cases in which they were used to design solutions that had a positive impact.
Xiaowei R’s critical point of view about the creation of impossible botanical images that represent empires showed how, from the visual universe, it has been decided to cut out, exclude and censor communities, values, and other realities. As an example, she provided the graphic images created by William Morris, and she explained how they were the reflection of a colonizing viewpoint. Finally, Xiaowei explained that this is also happening with the creation of images with AI, for example, when using DallE (an AI system capable of creating realistic images and art from a written description).
Additionally, Hideaki Matsui’s presentation on the human-computer relationship in physical spaces left a positive impression on the good use of AI. Maybe so as to defuse dystopian forecasts, he showed (with the specific case of Google devices) that more humanized solutions can be created if technology adapts to people’s needs and not vice versa.
The last talk of Interaction 23 was Kate Darling’s (robotics expert), and it was entitled “The New Breed.” She explained how to integrate robots in an ethical and conscious way into the lives of people and society in general, using emotions as the main connector. To conclude, she argued that we should not see them as a threat, because the potential of robots in AI is not to recreate what already exists, but to turn them into allies to what we are trying to build in our society. This means that robots do not determine the future, we do!
If you want to know more about what happened at Interaction 23, you can read other articles by colleagues who attended the event and also gave their views on it:
● Improving Interactions with Memories
● Undesign the defined. Design the undefined. # Interaction 23
● My top 10 talks from Interaction 23 | by Jason Mesut | Mar, 2023 | Medium
The videos of the talks will be available on Vimeo from the first days of April onwards. Stay tuned to this Vimeo link!
B-SIDE
First-Person Speaker
I learnt many new things from the event, but I was particularly moved by the possibility of challenging myself as a Designer and also at a personal level; as a Latin American, a Spanish speaker, and a woman.
I am Argentine, and I had the opportunity to give the first on-site talk in Spanish for a design community that is used to English as a universal language. It was my first on-site participation in this event (last year, I attended virtually), so, at first, I was a little bit scared by the language, by traveling on my own and by the cultural clash, but I pleasantly discovered that everything turned out OK!
My talk revolved around a project I am working on, in which we incorporated known techniques of design thinking, but we also ventured into adding new points of view and ways of working. Since there was a need to meet, this came naturally to us. And, to my surprise, at the event, I found out that what we are doing has hardly been explored and that it is still new to the design community. I talked about employee experience and total experience with real knowledge that has been put into practice.
Besides, I spoke in Spanish and practiced my speech so that my talk was as unhurried as possible. I avoided Argentine slang and jokes. I specially focused on making the translation as faithful as possible to reach a diverse audience in a clear way. My listeners could read the English translation through complementary screens onstage (an AI tool that translates in real time was used to achieve this 😉). In general, my audience spoke Spanish.
We, Latin Americans, are used to taking part in events in which Spanish, Portuguese, English, and maybe some other languages are spoken; therefore, coming upon live translations has never been a barrier. And despite being the first time in which this audience came across a talk that was not in their native language or in English, it was a success! Both for me and for the event’s organizers. This first experience will be a trendsetter for future IxDA events.
I also traveled on my own, and I was uncertain about whether or not I would bond with other people, about how willing they would be to exchange experiences and about how I would feel. Luckily, the event did its own work by encouraging its attendees to bond with one another both inside and outside the conference. After the first day, the town’s design studios opened its doors for us to take a tour, meet their gifted Designers and their work.
Furthermore, since we, Latin Americans, recognize each other, I met three colleagues with whom I bonded, and we spent the entire event together.
Finally, beyond the personal experience and the concrete contents of the talks, the event also aimed at creating openness, inclusion and at starting to break with what has already been established (or designed). If we read between the lines, we could see that the event was inviting us to become more permeable, more flexible and to design with more inclusion.
How to Stand Up to the Near Future
The whole event was about the way in which the global context requires us, Designers, to embrace uncertainty and diversify frameworks for action. At several levels, the event was a wake-up call to challenge things, to challenge what surrounds us; and also, to challenge ourselves even more.
Interaction 23 was not tinged with an apocalyptic viewpoint. On the contrary, it was very positive; we learnt that there is much to be done, but that we have tools to reverse the negative scenarios.
Almost by the time I was done writing this article, the letter from Elon Musk and other AI experts asking to stop performing experiments on this technology was made public.
Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects. OpenAI’s recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that “At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.” We agree. That point is now.
“Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” the letter written by Elon Musk and other AI experts: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/.
Surely, there are many interpretations behind these sayings, but I would like to finish the article by taking up two lessons I learnt from the event:
- As Designers, we have an ethical responsibility to make good use of AI and to avoid irreversible mistakes.
- We, humans, are the ones who create solutions and who are in control of them. If these scenarios get out of control, it is because, as individuals, we are allowing it.
Therefore, we should question all the more so the way in which we work and what we consider to be “the right way to design.”
