From Human to Hybrid
The Future of Human-Centered Design
Human-Centered Design (HCD) might be limiting our ability to anticipate the future. Let’s suspend ideas about the human being, and instead design for dynamic, socio-technical beings: Human-technology hybrids. We call it Hybrid-Centered Design™.
Written by Natalie Porter, Ph.D. and Scott Robinson on behalf of FreshForm.
User Experience (UX) design is a human-centered process of creating products and services that provide meaningful experiences to users.
For UX designers, humans take center stage.
We’re driven by a mission to optimize how humans experience technology and technological systems.
We think of technology as a tool that humans use and interface with in order to enhance our perceptions and skills.
We imagine that technology exists to improve human lives.
Put simply… Humans come first.
Human-Centered Design has its advantages.
Designing with and for people means:
- We can be intentional about the technologies we build.
- We can create objects and systems that meet our diverse psychological, cultural, and biological needs.
- We can reflect on and direct the course of technological change.
Yet, there is something unsettling about a problem-solving approach that places technology in a supporting role vis-a-vis humans.
Consider controversies surrounding emerging technologies. Digital assistants, advanced robotics, and autonomous vehicles — these are just a few examples of how artificial intelligence (AI) is creeping into “human” domains.
The World Economic Forum has already declared the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is underway. 4IR represents a “fundamental change in the way we live, work and relate to one another”. In the coming decades, our future world will be one where billions of people and billions of machines live together.
As AI continues to demonstrate capacity for subjective reasoning, complex social interaction, and moral choice, we are beginning to worry about losing control, even losing our humanity in the face of intelligent machines.
These controversies are consequential. They influence public attitudes about technology, and they shape markets and governance at their highest levels. They also create a compelling story about humans responding to, rather than driving, technological change.
What does this mean for Human-Centered Design?
Critics have already blamed HCD for its inability to cope with change. HCD, they say, is very good at telling us what people need and want in the here and now, but it’s not very good at predicting what will happen down the line — as humans transform alongside the technologies they rely on to get through the day.
As designers, we have to get better at anticipating these transformations. We have to think about how humans are adjusting their expectations, altering their attitudes, modifying their practices, and broadening their mindsets as they become more and more entangled with technologies.
We are all already hybrids
Over time, we humans have transformed ourselves and our environments to achieve certain ends.
- We’ve domesticated plants, animals, and landscapes to nourish and shelter ourselves — altering our bodies and bodily processes along the way.
- We’ve compressed time and space with transportation technologies, Fordist production techniques, and virtual communications — fueling markets while simultaneously changing the ways we move, think, and problem solve.
- We’ve augmented our mind/bodies with pharmaceuticals, genetic modifications, and artificial enhancements — healing and extending while deepening dependencies.
These histories of mutual transformation are generating increasingly uncanny experiences, which challenge our ideas about the integrity, and exceptionalism, of the human.
How many of you have overheard your children chatting with Alexa, asking her for help with their homework, or inviting her out to play?
How many of you have encouraged your children to be polite to Alexa, as if she and your family were engaged in some sort of social contract?
How many of you have relied on your Fitbit rather than your heartbeat to tell you how you are performing? Or a blood glucose monitor rather than dizziness to tell you that you’re crashing?
And how many of you have made decisions about where to go, what to pay attention to, and who to interact with — based on your smartphone’s battery life?
So it is with our contemporary technologies. We calibrate ourselves to engage with them. We make compromises. We improvise. We transform. And we create new possibilities for being together in the world.
We are worldmaking with others.
Instead of taking the human user as she is, we have to ask who she is becoming in relation to tech.
- Let’s push design thinking beyond the here and now
- Let’s move past attempts to preserve the integrity and authority of humans contra technology
- Let’s design systems for new kinds of sociotechnical beings, and new ways of becoming with technology
Strategies for future-oriented design
1. Highlight Hybridity
Resist the notion that humans and technologies are autonomous. Instead, ask how humans and technologies hybridize — or come together in particular times and places. Hybridity can be positive, negative, or neutral, but that will depend on social and cultural context rather than on some assumed separation or hierarchy between human and machine.
Hybridity opens up pathways for capturing how physical, digital, and social life spans beyond the human, to include meaningful and impactful relations with nonhuman entities.
2. Track Transformation
Scholars in anthropology and Science and Technology Studies have used hybridity to capture how technology has transformed our social, biological, and physical landscapes over time.
Hybridity allows us to avoid simplistic evaluations that:
- Pit technological advance as a threat to humanity
- Posit a world in which humans maintain exclusive control over technology
Hybrids gesture to a different kind of world: where humans are made and remade on the ground, and in relation to the devices and systems around them.
Humanity is constantly under revision.
3. Foster Mutual Flourishing
Shifting from human- to hybrid-centered design lets us generate new solutions for living well with an array of human and nonhuman actors.
The task at hand is not to rescue some essential or timeless form of “human” dignity, intelligence, or emotion.
For what is truly exceptional about humans — what has defined our evolutionary trajectory and survival for millennia — is our ability to change, cooperate, collaborate, and co-exist with others: human | nonhuman, biological | technological, and all things in between.
Let’s celebrate our inextricable entanglements with technology. Let’s engage in new, future-oriented practices to optimize the individual, social, and cultural outcomes of our changing relationships.
As we design, let us build integrated systems rooted in an understanding of our ability to affect and be affected by technologies; and let us do so with an eye toward facilitating mutually transformative and beneficial forms of hybridity.
Let’s flourish, together.
