Thread by @RohanIrvine

Back for day 2 at @UXAustralia!

First keybote: The design of meaning for the future of humanity by @kateo

#UXAustralia #uxa19 #uxaus2019

Kate is welcoming 5 audience members to the stage as part of the #upfront movement where people who are interested in speaking and want to breakdown some of the barriers.

@upfrontglobal

You know it's not far off that we'll have robots sitting with us at events like this.

Kate sometimes makes a joke about still being able to make a living as a speaker because robots can't do that.

Then she got scheduled on a panel with a robot

Kate is driven by this question:

How can humanity prepare for an increasing tech and data driven future?

This is such an urgent matter to discuss and talk about the issues that relate to UX and product design and the relation to humanity and what it means for the future to come.

The ideas we're talking about this morning are cross disciplinary and everyone wants to hear about them and figure out what to do with them.

The conversation at the moment is focussed on "what's good for business" not "what's goods for humanity"

And even when we do switch the conversation is not usual that we address the questions of humanity in the same context of business.

Everything is integrated.

Everywhere interesting where the physical and digital world connect through the data captured in the human experiences.

Business data is largely about human experience.

Analytics are people.

Often when we're looking at data we disconnect them frombthe real people they are.

Technology always advances to fulfil business objectives.

The way technology makes it to the mainstream and scale is after a business invests in them.

If we can figure out how to align human outcomes with business outcomes we will help humanity.

The at scale part is at scale. Using the technology capabilities to accelerate access.

How we break the false dichotomy.

There are three steps to get there.

1. Be our best selves.

What does it mean to be human?

What one world encapsulates being human?

Creativity/problem solving/innovation (not many in the audience)

Empathy/love (a lot of hands in the audience, but not all)

Confirm Humanity - re-captcha

Creativity & Problem solving

This isn't a uniquely human characteristic. Nonhuman animals use tools.

Machines are capable of problem solving and creativity

Picture is an generative adversarial network producing arts

Empathy & Love

Nonhuman animals are capable of being empathetic and live one another.

Machines are able to show empathy and love.

Therapy bots exist for people to begin their therapy journey in a low stakes environment. Is that empathy? Or is it behaving as if empathy?

What's the difference better empathy and behaving as empathy?

What's the difference between art and things made to look like art?

Humans craving meaning.

We seek it, thrive on it, puzzle over it, when it's offered to us we can't get enough of it.

There's a lot of really fundamental questions being asked withing this concepts of meaning.

How do you extend to notion of meaning to experiences?

Augmented reality is going to be one of our most important examples of layers of meanings.

There's an awful lot of interesting potential with augmented reality that hasn't been realised yet.

What's significant at the time.

Meaning is about what matters.

This augmented reality app shows words that may be significant to Kate's relationship

What matters?

What is going to matters?

These two questions are the most important for understanding meaning.

Kelly Services - a big staffing company - is thinking about what staffing up quickly means when your workers aren't necessarily people

Emerging technics going to add capacity and scale like you've never seen before.

Kate's done work with automation companies who are doing great at removing the need for physical labour which is unsettling.

We need to think about the unintended consequences of our design so we know the impact we may have on people.

Amazon Go store - cashless store where you walk in, select the things you want and leave. No interaction with a staff member.

When you start your app for the first time it tells you not to help anyone get products off a shelf.

What happens if we get used to the idea that we don't ask each other for help in the Amazon Go store?

Amazon acquired wholefoods.

They plan to open 3000 AmazonGo stores by 2021.

What does the dominant experience mean for humanity?

When this becomes the norm in all retail?

Experience at scale changes culture.

Experience at scale IS culture.

The experiences you're creating are creating culture and you need to be aware of the impact it will have

There's a tension between meaning and absurdity.

What is true and what is weird.

Anywhere you have not defined what meaningful is absurdity grows

Not the good absurdity. The endless meetings about nothing absurdity we don't want.

We need to be intentional about what we're creating and why. Understand the context.

We cannot allow absurdity to scale.

Kate has a love hate relationship with Automation.

It's great when it's implemented well, and horrible when it's not.

The experiences you will be creating will soon be automated or you will be designing automated experiences soon.

So you need to be aware of unintentional absurdity.

This is a map of jobs for potential automation.

Think of the socioeconomic consequences being changed as a result of automation.

Probability of job loss through automation in Australia.

This will impact is world wide and we need to be conscious of what we're designing.

There are a significant number of jobs that will be augmented, displaced, replaced and creates.

Marginalised People of Colour are going to be more impacted with automation.

We can't necessarily stop this from happening but we can definitely have the conversation about what consequences our business decisions are going to have on people and we need to be having them.

There will be more opportunities of humans working alongside machines.

It forces us to recognise that automation is a human and business opportunity and we have to be aware of the problems it presents culturally and strategically.

When you think about how humans work best in the work place:

The thing that's interesting about these two sets of requirements is that you can achieve with a well articulated definition of purpose.

Purpose is the shape meaning takes in business.

Why are we doing what we're doing?
What are we trying to do at scale?

Disney theme parks is 'create magical experiences'

It allows people to justify big investments in design because the purpose of the organisation is clear.

When you work on your projects in 3 to 5 words can you articulate what you're trying to achieve at scale?

It helps you mitigate conversations lokenthis

How can we be purposeful in what we're trying to achieve at scale?

We cannot allow meaning to be defined by AI and machines.

AI is not great a nuance yet.

You're using emotional memory and the sweetness of the muffin. Your cognitive senses are allowing you to distinguish between these imagines

Humans are better at nuance.

We are wired for meaning.

It's going to get harder to know what is meaningful, what's true.

Think of deep fakes and other tools for blurring reality.

It's going to always be trying to stay one step ahead.

We need to be able to spot the scaling absurdity, be aware of it and try to manage it.

We all can recognise at some level that we are in danger and we need to do something about it.

It is a powerfully important area where humans are being duped on such a large scale that we don't know what is created for play and what is a conspiracy

How do we build trust and use integrity to the work that we do?

Using data ethically and respectfully.

We can create our best tech by being intentional.

Leave behind the term user experience.

It doesn't help us to use these terms because it compartmentalized the human experience when what we need to do is incorporate it, be holistic and intentional about how we include it

To design meaningful and do ensional experiences:

Meaningful machine-les human experience.

When we talk about automation we talk about automating the meaningless tasks, but if you take that to scale it becomes a distopian world where everything around us is meaningless

Use human data respectfully.

The data we are collecting is real people.

Be very conscious of what you collect and how you're using it.

As we gain efficiency and profit invest it back into people.

We are going to have less and less to do with jobs and we need the experiences created by machines to be meaningful.

Protect human data.

Use it to make meaning.

We should take the opportunity to make meaningful experiences from our data.

You're not future ready if you're not thinking about the how your decision impact the future of the world and humanity.

Machines are what we encode of ourselves.

Why would we not encode our best selves? Our most enlightened views of the world?

Have the conversations.

What are you trying to achieve at scale?

The tech driven future is not going to be strictly distopia or utopia. It's what we choose to make it.

We can make the best futures for the most people.

It's within our reach.

Kate wants you to feel the sense of hope, that you can make it different, you can make it better.

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