Transforming the Future of Work through Human-centred Design
Abigail Sellen, Microsoft Research Cambridge, United Kingdom
Truth in an Age of Information
Alan Dix, Swansea University, United Kingdom
Transforming the Future of Work through Human-centred Design
Abigail Sellen
Microsoft Research Cambridge
United Kingdom
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Brief Bio
Abigail Sellen is Deputy Director at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK. She also oversees the lab’s portfolio of research exploring the Future of Work, taking an interdisciplinary approach to designing and developing new productivity tools that work in partnership with people. Abi has published on many topics in HCI including: intelligible AI, healthcare, computer input, help systems, reading, paper use in offices, videoconferencing design, search, photo use, gesture-based input, human error and computer support for human memory. This includes “The Myth of the Paperless Office” (with co-author Richard Harper), which won an IEEE award. She is a member of the CHI Academy and a Fellow of the ACM, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society for the Arts. She is an Honorary Professor at Lancaster University, the University of Nottingham, and University College London. In 2020, she was elected as an International Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and in 2021 she was elected to the Royal Society.
Abstract
What does the future of work look like in this post-pandemic world? What would we like it to look like? Using a large compendium of research carried out over the past two years on how work is transforming, I will speculate on where we are heading, and discuss how human-centred design can help invent a future more aligned with human aspiration. This includes exploring why we work, and how we measure whether organisations are successful in empowering their workers. I will also look at some of the fundamental changes that have occurred because of the shift to remote work, and discuss the future of work looking beyond office workers in the Global North. I will argue that this shift to a more inclusive, global view of the future of work is where we next need to focus our attention.
Truth in an Age of Information
Alan Dix
Swansea University
United Kingdom
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Brief Bio
Alan Dix is a Professorial Fellow at Cardiff Metropolitan University and also Director of the Computational Foundry; a £32.5M project of Swansea University, Welsh Government, and the European Commission to promote ground-breaking digital research with a real impact on society. He is known principally for his work in human–computer interaction including writing one of the key textbooks in the area. He was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2013 and is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Outside academia, Alan has been co-founder of two tech companies, developed intelligent lighting, worked in local government and even submarine design. In every role, he seeks to understand and innovate in all aspects where people and technology meet. His interests range from formal methods to design creativity, including some of the earliest papers in the HCI literature on privacy and mobile interaction, and in the early 1990s he was one of the first to recognise the potential dangers of gender, ethnic and social bias in black-box machine learning systems. Last year he completed a book "Statistics for HCI: Making Sense of Quantitative Data" and his online creativity course was released at interaction-design.org. This year his new book on the design of physical-digital products, “TouchIT: Understanding Design in a Physical-Digital World”, is being published by Oxford University Press and he is working on another book on AI for social justice, building on the UK’s recently completed Not-Equal network about the digital economy and social justice.For ten years Alan lived on Tiree, a small Scottish island where he ran Tiree Tech Wave, a biannual event allowing designers and technologists to meet and work alongside the local community. While he was there, in 2013, he ventured off-island to walk one thousand miles around Wales, partly a research expedition and partly a personal pilgrimage to the land of his birth. Alan’s role at the Computational Foundry brought him back to his homeland.
Abstract
Politicians have always been economical with the truth and newspapers have toed an editorial line. However, never in recent times does it seem that confidence in our media has been lower. From the Brexit battle bus in the UK to suspected Russian meddling in US elections, fake news to alternative facts – it seems impossible for the general public to make sense of the contradictory arguments and suspect evidence presented both in social media and traditional channels. Even seasoned journalists and editors seem unable to keep up with the pace and complexity of news.
These problems were highlighted during Covid when understanding of complex epidemiological data was essential for effective government policy and individual responses.
If democracy is to survive and nations coordinate to address global crises, we desperately need tools and methods to help ordinary people make sense of the extraordinary events around them: to sift fact from surmise, lies from mistakes, and reason from rhetoric. Similarly, journalists need the means to help them keep track of the surfeit of data and information so that the stories they tell us are rooted in solid evidence.
Crucially in increasingly politically fragmented societies, we need to help citizens explore their conflicts and disagreements, not so that they will necessarily agree, but so that they can more clearly understand their differences.
These are not easy problems and do not admit trite solutions. However, there is existing work that offers hope: tracing the provenance of press images, ways to expose the arguments in political debate, tracking the influence of news on electoral opinion.
I hope that this talk will give hope that we can make a difference and offer challenges for future research.