Welcome to the To Be Designed online conference Summy Pack by Summurai.
To Be Designed was a one-day virtual conference produced by Rosenfeld Media. It took place April 25, 2017 and included 7 fantastic lectures by design professionals and industry leaders. Our team from Summurai visited the conference and created this "Summy Pack" To make sure you dont miss anything.

We summarized the lectures and narrated them into 7 summies, that will give you the main insights. If you find this service valuable, please use the share button and share the love.We invite you to go ahead and get smarter. The Summurai team.

Cennydd Bowles is a digital product designer and writer. He has fifteen years of experience helping companies realize the benefits of good design, most recently as the design lead at Twitter. Cennydd is the author of the popular book Undercover User Experience Design (New Riders 2010) and is writing his second book Ethical by Design (due 2017).

Bowles’s session focuses on the discussion of ethical issues concerning technology. He discusses why companies make poor ethical decisions and the development of ethical thinking in other morally-charged disciplines. He also discusses methods of engaging users in the ethics of emerging technology and ways for designers to engage positively and affect ethical outcomes. This is so that design decisions benefit not only ourselves, but our wider communities and the world at large.

There is a wrong belief that technology is neutral; that mere objects cannot have moral relevance, thus resulting in unethical actions such as racist chatbots, manipulative research and privacy violations that undermine trust, and harm the users instead of helping them.

The danger of automation without conscious efforts of providing security and safety to users is imminent, especially when the technological industry is unwilling to grapple the ethical, social, and political angles of the future.

There is an actual need for a deeper ethical dialogue about emerging technology, and interaction design’s role within it. It is important to have a strong ethical foundation as a basis for designers with new technology. 

Design is applied ethics. Some designers explicitly include morality in their designs in such away that they prevent what they think are harmful actions. Whatever object made, whether explicitly moral or not, exists in the future. When designing, there is a creation of statement of desirability and that is a clear ethical component. Ethics shall accompany technological progress rather than necessarily oppose it. 

The promise of automation and A1 is very clear; reliability and productivity is increased in many systems. However, as this goes along, ethical issues are also becoming prevalent. One of the clearest ethical issue is bias.  Some systems are created in a way that it discriminates certain groups of users which should not be the case. Designers must come up with ways to scrutinize the presence of bias in their product and act to prevent such. 

Designs must be built with honesty; exposing data flaws and the real nature of interactions. Designers must take moral control. Bowle’s suggested the four ethical tests designers could use to examine the moral impact of the choices they made :

1. What if everyone did what I’m about to do?



2. Am I treating people as ends or means?



3. Am I maximising happiness?



4. Would I be happy for this to be published in tomorrow’s papers?

There should also be a concerted effort to promote ethical values and actions. Companies or organizations must come up with ethical decisions while securing their businesses. Research, policies and documents are good sources to consider in ethical decision-making. However, culture dictates. Leaders must recognize that their words and actions have an impact on people. They set standards of ethical norms and foster ethical or unethical decisions.

With respect to technology, regulation won’t save us nor will codes of ethics.  The responsibility is down to us; to engage everyday with the ethical impact of our work. To hold each other and be accountable for the decisions we make. It may be a complex and uncomfortable task but that is the nature of ethics and this is the only way to gain the trust that emerging technology requires over the coming decades.

Carla Diana is a designer, author and educator who explores the impact of future technologies through hands-on experiments in product design and tangible interaction. She has designed a range of products from robots to connected home appliances, and her designs have appeared on the covers of Popular Science, Technology Review and the New York Times Sunday Review.

She is a faculty member in the Integrated Product Design program at the University of Pennsylvania where she has created some of the country’s first courses on designing smart objects, and an ongoing collaborator with the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at the University of Texas, Austin, where advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are manifest in expressive robots. She writes and lectures frequently on the social impact of robotics and emerging technology and created the world’s first children’s book on 3D printing, LEO the Maker Prince. Her seminal essay, “Talking, Walking Objects”, is a good representation of her view of our connected, robotic future.

In this session, Diana provides an overview of the landscape of smart objects that exist today along with an exploration of the potential for new objects to be designed for the near future.  She discusses how holistic design methods, using light, sound and motion can be used to build engaging product experiences that fully embrace the relationships among people, objects, and information. 

Highlights include ways to envision product experiences and design methodologies that can be used to explore and quickly iterate through ideas that arrive at human-centered concepts built around a specific product behaviors.

Design has always been about conversations and currently, the basis of this conversation now  includes light, sound, motion and continuous sensing due to cheaper price of sensors, cheaper computing power, robotics, connected devices and sophisticated algorithms. The goal is to connect with the product through feedback.

The use of light, sound and motion as ways to converse is highly emphasized. Examples were given in this particular part such as for light, there is the ambient orb of David Rose, vitality glowcaps, macbook breathing light, hammerhead, fuel band (LED array), Sony Xperia Projector, etc. For sound, Jawbone Jambox and Toymail are used as examples. For motion, this has not been regularly for a while because it is the most mechanically difficult but it is expected that due to its powerful impact, we are about to see them a lot more. Among the many examples given are robots like Shimon Marimba Playing Robot, Polycam Eagle Eye Camera and Jibo the Personal Robot.

Our emotional connection to everything is really important. The value of social interactions shall also be given attention. Designers have the responsibility to help clarify the mental model and avoid misleading thoughts. As a designer, one should illustrate what is happening on the robot’s brain by showing people a light, sound or motion through  shorthand. It should clearly show that robot’s brain is not a human brain.

The given design methods in this session are as follows:

1. Ecosystem maps



2. Scenario storyboards



3. Ergonomics - distance of the product from the body



4. Vision imagery - telling story at a glance



5. Video sketch - interaction in real time and in context



6. Document of moments



7. Worksheet for interactions



8. Behavior chart and flow charting



9. Behavior programming 

Diana also emphasizes the use of experience prototypes to explore electronic behavior in real time. Example given is !@N of Kiderman and Johnson of UPenn - it is a swear jar; open source script with voice recognition and programmed to recognize certain words with full embody response.

Giles Colborn is a co-founder of CXpartners -  one of the world’s leading independent experience design consultancies. He is also the Author of ‘Simple and Usable’. Giles is former president of the UPA, co-chair of IA Summit, and UX Awards judge. Additionally, he has worked with the British Standards Institute in developing standards for web accessibility. 

In this session, Giles justifies why conversational interfaces offer new opportunities for swifter more satisfying interaction. He also emphasizes on some of the pitfalls into which conversational interfaces can easily fall. He sheds a clearer light to the psychology of human conversation and shows how you can turn this into design principles for more satisfying user experiences–whether you’re building a conversational user interface or a standard touch UI.

The challenge to designers is to create a good and intuitive UI designs that are acceptable to users. Users are geared towards getting information in the easiest way possible and whatever product that does not fit this ease of access are surely unacceptable. One example given is the London Train times scheduling system. The challenge is to fit the system into a small screen and make the interaction more human. Therefore, a chat interface where the user can send a message asking what time their train is leaving and receive a response with the exact information they need in order to catch their train is the most efficient way possible.

Computers are getting pretty good at language. The use of bots has become the face of conversational designs. For instance, the writing and reading of articles are usually done by bots. Bots working for bots. However, it is also a known fact that bots are mostly terrible to interact with. What they require the user to do is to tap and tap buttons without the real human interaction or treatment. One of the better way to enhance interaction is the use of natural language, voice in particular which is far more efficient than just simply tapping. User would just simply give instruction and then a response is given back - minimum input to maximum output.  One good example is ‘Siri” which allows you to have a hands-free conversation with your virtual assistant. However, voice search like ‘Siri” heavily depends on location. It is great in private spaces or less stress environment such as your home, but not so great in public spaces like your office or the train station.

Bots are usually designed with decision-trees and lack the natural language elements like being able to change one’s mind as the conversation continues about a question that was previously asked. To create a greater experience, a natural and friendly conversation with bots should be had. Adding personality to the bot is another way to make voice interactions more user friendly.

 A design with social and emotional sensitivity is highly encouraged. Good bots are ones who listen and empathize. The more human interactions, the better. However, despite all these, designers must recognize that the designs are intended to create assistants and not friends nor human replacements.

John Maeda is an internationally recognized speaker and author, his books include The Laws of Simplicity, Creative Code and Redesigning Leadership. He recently joined Automattic as Global Head of Computational Design + Inclusion, and previously served as Design Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a world-leading venture capital firm. His Twitter is one of TIME Magazine’s 140 Best Twitter Feeds.

In this session, Maeda addresses questions from the audience based on the the key points of the 2017 Design in Tech Report . The main focus of the discussion is on the business value of design in the industry today. Design was a field invented to create more economic prosperity and over time, it began to be something that was broader. He emphasized that the majority of people with design education don’t see it as a commercial act, it is more closer to fine arts. He observed that employability of these people compared to others who hold non-design degrees seems to be low.

Maeda also shared that his interest in design have moved towards the space of inclusion and product. Diversity and inclusion has most value when spoken in product circles. In terms of product circles, it becomes an opportunity to grow the total addressable market (TAM).

He mentioned as well that in the report, China was featured because in the United States, there is a bias in believing that China has no innovation. However, he believed that the biases are brought about by the notion that “Made in China” equates to “cheaply made” and that China is among the countries that skipped the desktop/PC revolution .  It is then important to note that the design culture and technology is different because introduction step is different. Culture of adoption varies from place to place hence diversity has become a relevant matter.

He briefly discussed the matter of “Design Thinking” which results consensus between multiple stakeholders. In large organizations like the ones that McKinsey & Co and IBM serv, design thinking provides a powerful set of tools to get calcified product and service organizations to move faster and become innovative again.

Maeda also suggests we look at the aging market as an opportunity.

Lastly, he concluded that AI will change the role and workflow of the designer.  This scenario forces humans to take higher level jobs where opportunity is present.

Mike Kuniavsky leads user-experience design in the Innovation Services Group at PARC, a Xerox company. Prior to PARC, Mike cofounded several successful UX-centered companies, including ThingM, which designs and manufactures ubiquitous computing and Internet of Things products, and Adaptive Path, a well-known design consultancy. He has worked with top technology companies—including Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Whirlpool, and Qualcomm—to design new products, guide product strategy, and create user-centered design and development cultures.

He is the author of Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research and Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design. 

In this session, Kuniavsky looks into the design challenges of systems that anticipate users’ needs and the acts needed to address them. It sits at the intersection of the internet of things, user experience design and machine learning (AI). The combination of all these is now prevalent and enthusiasm is really high.

Consumer IoT products have a very different business model than traditional consumer electronics. In traditional consumer electronics, a relationship ends when a product is bought, while with the IoT, the sale of a product is the beginning of the relationship and so the physical object holds almost no value for either parties. This means that service is more of a strategy and hardware/product is a mere tactic.

One approach to make money in the space of dematerialized devices and cloud service is to change from an ownership model to a subscription model. The IoT technology is what gives an efficient way to track and charge for assets.

The real value connected services offer is their ability to make sense of the world on our behalf, to reduce cognitive load by enabling people to interact with devices at a higher level than simple telemetry, at the level of intentions and goals, rather than data and control. Humans are not built to collect and make sense of huge amounts of data across many devices, or to articulate our need as systems of mutually interdependent components. Computers are great at it.

Kuniavsky also mentioned about the issues with the UX of Predictive Behavior and it include the following:

1. Expectations of Autonomous Behavior



2. Uncertainty



3. Control

He also added that to address these issues, the following patterns may be had:

1. Create a mental model of needs and desires the system will intercept.



2. Machine learning UX is a conversation - learn from apprentices of what their capabilities are and why they made certain decisions, rather than others, when doing the things we taught them to do.



3. Have a user story for every stage of prediction.



4. Set behavior expectations.



5. Explain when a state has changed or is going to change.



6. Create clear ways for people to adjust the predictive behavior.



7. Support people, don’t replace them.

As a conclusion, he said that IoT is not about things but the experience created by the services for which things are avatars. The job of entrepreneurs, developers and designers is to create systems and services that help people, rather than adding extra work in the name of simplistic automation. What is to be created is a symbiotic relationship where we and and our predictive systems, work together to create a world that provides the most value, for the least cost, for the most people, for the longest time.

Liza Kindred, the founder of Third Wave Fashion, has been writing frequently and speaking globally for many years. She is considered the top expert on fashion tech–and she’s literally wrote the book on the future of commerce, as well as a second book about designing for wearables and connected devices.

In this session, Kindred discusses why there has been so much hype about wearable tech, what’s gone wrong along the way and how to solve the problems.

Kindred started presenting statistics regarding wearable tech and some of these include the estimate wearable tech market in 2017 of $4 Billion, demographic such as 48% of wearable owners are 18-35 years old and in 2008 there are more connected devices than human beings.  

The problems involved in today’s wearable tech are considered to be ridiculous because they are simply made without any significance and doesn’t help us to move ahead. Bandwagon has also caused the narrowing down of the definition of wearable tech. Wearable tech is actually technology that is worn on or near the body that helps us to mediate or interact with the environment around us.

Today’s wearable tech has also poses serious problems such as sleep deprivation among users, breach of privacy through hacking and non-delivery of ordered wearables either through scamming or the lack of ability to deliver what is expected.

How can we get it right then? Design more mindfully and for human connection with a good value system. Nine (9) Mindful tech values to consider are as follows:

1. Design for human connection.



2. Awaken the senses.



3. Create utility or joy.



4. Let the tech disappear.



5. Design for disconnect.



6. Build extensively.



7. Simplify. Then simplify again.



8. Narrow the digital divide.



9. Make something the world needs.

In the spirit of mindfulness, take a moment to think about whether we are designing for the world that we want to live in.

Christopher is the Global Design Practice Manager for the Travel and Transportation sector with IBM, bringing IBM Design goodness to his vertical. 

He is co-author of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction (Rosenfeld Media, 2012), co-author of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Edition (Wiley, 2015), keeper of the blog scifiinterfaces.com, and author of Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People (Rosenfeld Media, 2017)

In this session, Noessel presents the the fresh challenges in understanding the unique promises, pitfalls and requirements of today’s technologies such as artificial intelligence.  The question to answer now is whether or not computers take initiative.

Agentive technology is a broader category of technology that does things in users’ behalf (e.g. cameras without photographers, vacuums without vacuum-ers and cars without drivers).   

Agentive Technology is interesting. It is “new” - not conceptually new but it is a lot easier to make. It is a different model for us to work with. Agentive model offers wider involvement in the process without requiring much manual efforts. And lastly, agentive tech is a shangri-la of user-centered business because it offers greater value to customers. Value provided is “without” effort. Agentive tech is a threshold technology in which once a culture commits to that technology, they can’t really go back.

Agentive Tech is Artificial Intelligence falling in any of the three categories : narrow, general or super. As of today, general A.I. doesn’t exist yet. Agentive tech deals with narrow A.I. because it can do certain things. Narrow A.I. can be divided in three parts: Automatic which seeks to eliminate human, Assistive which help human to do something and Agentive which does things in humans’ behalf.

Automatic technologies are well-constrained and are not personalized (e.g. automatic grocery doors). Assistive technologies provide assistance to humans with respect to their jobs, connection, physiology, skills and art.  Agentive technology does everything else that human have to do, things that humans are unsuited to doing (e.g. auto-pilot), unwilling to do (e.g. ocean cleaning) or can’t do alone (e.g. space exploration). 

Therefore, it is proven that computers can take initiative, they do and they should.