How (might we) design the ideal integration between humans and machines?
As a leader in service design and with more than 25 years of experience, Shelley Evenson is always exploring how technologies might impact human needs and the development of strategies that respond to those needs.
Q: How is generative AI going to impact work?
SE: I’m a designer, and I have done many things at Accenture, but I’ve always been about integrating business, design, and technology. I helped shape the FORM methods and practices that integrated data and analytics and value creation and agile and storytelling and design thinking.
Now, my role at Song is to be the bridge between human insights, design, and intelligence, sort of trying to find ways to link them together from the beginning.
I work on a lot of different and interesting projects, but for the last few years, my client has been Accenture. Nevertheless, I’m very happy to be talking with client account teams again, particularly about what generative AI can do! I really believe it’s going to change business fundamentally. It’s going to change the way we work, the way we learn, and the way we play. I’m a design optimist. I think if we think about it now, we can help ensure that we’re designing for both the value and the values that people have.
Q: How is Gen AI going to impact work?
SE: As I explained in the piece that I published for LinkedIn recently, designers can play important roles in shaping the development and use of generative AI as a new technology. And because of our experience and core competencies, I think at Song we’re uniquely positioned to help our clients think about understandability from not just a computer science perspective, or, an AI tech perspective, but from the human perspective, and how we can create entirely new experiences that revolve around that understandability. And I know, some folks in research, the responsible AI team is also thinking about this.
Q: I think that it’s fascinating to notice that we are using qualities like intelligence and creativity applied to machines, and I would like to take a step back and try to understand what we mean by being creative in just human terms.
SE: To me, being creative is very human, and I think what’s really interesting is that what we see in terms of the results from these tools is that it reflects back to us what we think we are.
What excites me about how I think it’s going to change work is that learning is going to be scaffolded in new ways. It’s a virtuous circle we’re creating, that the more we provide feedback, the better the AI is gonna get. And the more, the better the AI gets, it’s going to help people get better and think differently and more thoughtfully about what we want to learn about, like the words that they’re putting in these prompts to communicate with AI. What Gen AI is teaching us, even at the school level, is how to think much more effectively.
If you talk about creativity in terms of learning and connecting ideas in new ways, it’s not only going to produce beautiful things, AI is also going to help us get smarter.
Q: Is it the goal to teach AI to do everything humans can do? Do you think that’s where we are going?
SE: I don’t think it’s about teaching them to be able to do human things because I suspect that machines will eventually do them. But in the end, we need to always be thinking -what is valuable to people? We want what they do to be able to be valuable to us. So that work gets better and the things that they do, even if they are or feel menial, have to align with our human values.
Q: Growing up I wasn’t allowed to use a calculator in math class because it was considered cheating. What do you think about the news of not letting kids use Gen AI in school?
SE: That reminded me of the early days. We were working with Motorola and people used to think of people who were walking down the street and talking like they were crazy, right? Which means our perceptions changed. Now, everybody’s talking everywhere, and it took us a while as a culture to adjust and adapt to those situations. So, I think schools will learn how to leverage this in ways that accelerate our children’s thinking rather than consider it cheating.
I really think we can teach kids to learn how to look at things that are generated differently and understand how that happened and why that happened, and what sort of levers they could pull to change those outcomes. And that to me, is ultimately a really human thing to do.
Q: As a designer, what do you think are the right questions to ask as we develop our relationship with Gen AI?
SE: You know, I really like the book Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty.
What I really like is talking about the fusion skills for the missing middle, and the human and machine hybrid activities. I felt like it goes back to what I used to teach about service design. What we need to be thinking about is: what are the person-to-person, person-to-machine, and machine-to-machine interactions that we’re supporting? And you can’t do any of those in isolation, you have to think about them as a system, and I think it’s just that the systems are more complex. I was talking to some colleagues from Copenhagen this morning, and they were proposing that the teams that we have a need to be much more multidisciplinary, and I couldn’t agree more.
I think we need to have social scientists, data scientists, designers, and business people working together from the beginning to shape these things. So, it means that we’re going to have to shape our teams differently.
I don’t understand the technology as deeply as a technologist since I’m a designer, but I think we’re on the right track to be able to integrate the human side with technology in Song. And we just have to make sure that it has that voice within all of Accenture.
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