The next user you design for won’t be a human
At Normative we’ve always held that the future of design wasn’t just about designing for people. What’s increasingly clear is that this future has arrived and with it a whole new set of user challenges and opportunities. One of the most interesting and immediately relevant challenge/opportunity pairings is the concept of the Centaur — when your user is a blend of human and machine.
It’s an exciting and challenging time to be working in the innovation field, and understanding how the notion of the user is changing is becoming a critical part of the innovators toolkit.
Over on FastCo Design, I’ve written a new article digging into this idea: how do you design for a user that is more than human? The simple answer is that you move beyond the idea of making technology easy to use and increase your focus on giving people new capabilities that work in partnership with technology. Less like users, more like team members. The less than simple answer is that we’re just scratching the surface around designing for these new hybrid forms of human and machine intelligence. Of course, none of this is new, but now we’re finally at a place where the theory is becoming practice.
