Ensuring That Human Values Play a Central Role in Our Digital Future

By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research

On March 15-16, 2007, a forum entitled HCI 2020: Human Values in a Digital Age (opens in new tab), was held in Sanlúcar la Mayor, Spain, just outside Seville. Its purpose was to gather luminaries in computing, design, social sciences, and philosophy of science to formulate an agenda for human-computer interaction (HCI) over the next decade and beyond.

The event—facilitated by Microsoft and convened by Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen (opens in new tab) of Microsoft Research Cambridge (opens in new tab), Tom Rodden (opens in new tab) of the United Kingdom’s Nottingham University, and Yvonne Rogers (opens in new tab) of that nation’s Open University—resulted in a detailed report, released April 2, called Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020 (opens in new tab), which seems certain to become required reading for those interested in the ramifications of our digital future and in ways society must adjust to the technological changes to come.

The report will be displayed prominently in Florence, Italy, April 5-10 during CHI 2008 (opens in new tab), the 26th conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, co-chaired by Mary Czerwinski (opens in new tab) of Microsoft Research Redmond (opens in new tab) and Arnie Lund, director of User Experience for Microsoft’s Mobile and Tailored Platforms Division. Several other Microsoft employees hold senior leadership positions on this year’s conference committee, including Desney Tan (opens in new tab) of Microsoft Research Redmond, who is the technical-program chair.

Of the papers accepted for this year’s CHI, for which Microsoft is a major sponsor, 20 are from Microsoft Research, 12 percent of the total. Sixteen of the 20 were written in collaboration with academic partners, representing 12 universities worldwide. Two of the Microsoft Research papers won Best of CHI awards, and three others were nominated. And Bill Buxton (opens in new tab), principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, will receive the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award, presented to individuals for outstanding contributions to the study of human-computer interaction.

The Being Human report, a provocative and illuminating study, figures to be much-discussed during CHI 2008. In the days preceding the unveiling of the report, Harper found a few minutes to discuss it and its findings:

Q: As you were defining the scope of the forum and digesting the discussions that occurred, did you find yourself marveling at how far technology has come and how far it still has to go?

Harper: Yes, and marveling because it’s become so ordinary that we forget to notice it. When we were trying to document the discussions, we realized how the world is like the world we imagined—futuristic—years ago.

Q: What prompted the effort to redefine HCI?

Harper: HCI researchers have been talking about a need to write a new agenda. Research funding for HCI has been emphasizing speed and ease of use with systems, but the values the systems might be providing is often more important. And now, as we’ve reached the point where a lot of systems have been pretty well designed in terms of usability, our interests should naturally develop.

At the same time, technological infrastructures have undergone startling changes. When HCI began, we were struggling with the PC on the desktop. Then the Ethernet created new possibilities, the emergence of the Web even more. But now, we have satellite systems guiding our cars, we have integrated financial systems, we have elaborate office networking systems, and we have our own personal, wearable device. The world is fantastically richer than was thought possible 20 years ago.

We need to settle down and reflect on the impact of these changes. Microsoft had the resources to let us convene an event like this, where we were able to identify leading thinkers and bring them together to debate and discuss these issues.

Q: What were your goals for the forum, and how do you assess your success?

Harper: Our goals for the forum were to focus attention and to create a shared mind amongst leading researchers in corporate and academic life from around the world on the question of: If we move forward and recognize the importance of human values, how might we do it, what would it entail, what difference would it make? We wanted to produce a report, the Being Human report, which could be our anchor for a new, invigorated trade for the next 10 years.

Q: Who were the participants in the forum, and who were your collaborators inmaking it happen?

Harper: Our key collaborators were Yvonne Rogers, who originally suggested that we might be able to achieve something like this; Tom Rodden, who led the computer-science world to this event; and my colleague Abi Sellen.

Participants included people from Sony, from Philips, from Google. We hosted people from leading academic institutions in Europe, North America, Japan, and people from outside of computer science: management scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers of science together. It was a rich, broad, deep community.

Q: What were your top-level takeaways?

Harper: What it means to interact with computers has been transformed. No. 1, the traditional graphical user interface (GUI) on the desktop or on the mobile phone, is just one of the many ways that we interact with computers. And those are changing rapidly. Even as we go about our daily lives, we might not even know it, but we are interacting with computers in new ways, creating digital traces of our behavior in new ways.

Secondly, we are massively dependent upon computers and systems and networks, with what one might call ecologies of computers. Much of our lives would cease to function without computers. Computers on the desktops are simply symbols of a much greater dependency.

Beyond that, the facilities that computer systems and networks have provided have changed the ways in which we connect with each other. We now live in a world where we expect to be in touch with each other instantly and continuously, and this means in intimate ways as well as objective, professional ones. It’s as much about knowing where your partners and friends are as it is knowing what’s happening in military affairs and economics around the world. This is transforming our sense of ourselves and our society; it’s a change in sensibility that reflects transformations in how our society functions through technology.

The ways in which technologies can store, capture, and analyze data has meant that the voyage of our lives is now potentially different than it used to be. For example, now we can not only store our personal histories, but also we might use technologies to create new stores and repositories, capturing our behaviors in ways that we’ve never imagined before. A wearable camera could let you create a rich narrative of a holiday that you might want to post on the Web and share with millions. That wearable camera might work entirely autonomously, switch itself on, then download its contents and switch itself off. This creates ways in which one’s existence is shared and made visible that weren’t imaginable 10 years ago, or even five years ago.

Such changes force us to ask how we measure ourselves and how we determine what we keep and what we choose to throw away. Now, we can keep infinite amounts of stuff, more than we thought possible, not just in terms of storage, but different kinds of stuff. So now, we need to say: What’s our audit trail?

Lastly, computer technologies are enabling us to express ourselves in ways that are transforming how we conduct our lives. Different ways of communicating and being in touch with the family are used in artful ways. People are using technologies not just for the prosaic and traditional ways of saying hello every so often, but to create new experiences that people—their friends, their families—might enjoy. They communicate in new ways to create new experiences, to create social bonds in new ways and to create new kinds of content. We are populating the world with different artistic artifacts.

Q: Did you encounter any big surprises during the forum?

Harper: We were surprised how both excited and apprehensive participants were about the prospects of designing for human values. That’s good and bad news. It means the burden of doing things well and properly is greater than it used to be. But part of the problem we have in designing for values is that we need to make our preferences and values clearer, and in some cases, differences between values are not clear-cut and can’t necessarily be objectively ascertained. Sometimes, there are profound differences in peoples’ values, and both sides have good reasons for those differences. As we move forward in HCI research, accounting for differences of opinion and differences of desire requires bigger shoulders for the researchers to lift the arguments—and the design possibilities—all the way to solutions.

Q: What is the biggest challenge that people face in coping with the new world of computing?

Harper: Two things: On one hand, to be familiar with and to understand how, wherever they are and whatever they’re doing, they are linked by a myriad of umbilical cords to the digital world. That has consequences for their security, for their privacy, for their capacity to contribute to society. Our knowledge of these things has been insufficient, and we need to change both how we educate ourselves about these things and how we keep engaged and up-to-date with that knowledge once we have been educated.

Secondly, we can easily distract ourselves and become intoxicated by the new forms of creative engagement one can indulge in with computers and by new forms of communication and expression. We can neglect to think carefully about what we are attaining. We can delight in the new technologies without thinking also about the purposes and the goals that should lie beyond the seeking of delight.

Q: One of the main themes of the report is the importance of human values in the relationship between humankind and technology. What role do human values play? How are they defined? How do you overcome differences of opinion in various geographical areas or various strata of society, and then bring that all to bear to govern how our relationship with technology evolves?

Harper: We think you have to do this in a fashion that is more encompassing and more subtle so that, as you explore certain kinds of human values, such as something to do with memory or the mind or intelligence, for example, you might involve philosophers and other human scientists or human-sciences experts to participate in the inventive process. That’s never been done before.

One important consequence of this is that research into new technology can no longer rely on computer-science research alone. This is no longer sufficient. To do innovative research and to make the world a better place, we need to marshal expertise from across academe, as well as across corporate research environments, so that the right tools are used to analyze and understand ways of enabling values for different places, agendas, economies with different infrastructures and different values in mind.

This doesn’t mean that you design for anything and everything. It means that you have to determine ways of judging what’s appropriate, what’s good design, and what’s relevant design in more careful, thoughtful, and profound ways than before.

For many years, technology has been developed, and then society shapes it and polishes it. Now, society’s hopes and goals and people need to be involved in the process of developing technology from the outset, because it makes a big difference to what the technologies end up becoming. There’s no longer a line between technology and invention and development and society, no longer a line between what the technology might do and what the user can do. What human endeavor might be and what social endeavor might be must be considered from the very bottom of the firmware in devices and in the infrastructures that link different devices right through to the GUI on the outside.

Q: What kinds of tradeoffs have to be made as our relationship with technology becomes increasingly complex?

Harper: Trust. What you trust shifts, because now, you have to trust things that you might not know anything about, and you might not even know you are trusting them. The boundaries of what we trust and how we trust and what we perceive as trusting are becoming ambiguous and are shifting.

What we hold ourselves accountable for individually and what we think others might be accountable for or what we might think of the machinery of our society, our computers, might be accountable for—the lines of accountability are also shifting and transforming in ways we’re not necessarily familiar with. Whose fault is it when a plane crash-lands? Systems engineers? Pilot training? Pilot standards? Air-traffic control? It’s no longer clear. In fact, it’s not necessarily clear that we should be pointing at one particular thing, at human factors as against systems error.

We need to think carefully about how we judge the necessary skills we have as individual people and the relationship between those skills and the tools we have at hand. Those computer tools might be doing things for us in ways we don’t know, but they’re enabling us to achieve new things. We need to reflect more carefully on how things that we view as essential to us as people—our skills, our abilities, our capacities—are being affected by the ever-deeper involvement by computers in the things we do.

Q: The report raises questions about legality, ethics, morality. Does society have mechanisms in place to address these concerns?

Harper: In a broad sense, obviously, society does, but in reference to the ecology of systems that now encompass our everyday lives, no, I don’t think so. We need to start thinking about these things with a judicious breadth of vision that encompasses the changes brought about by computers, and we should not confine our reflections and concerns to the obvious, such as what is private information and what is public information. We need to think that what’s public and what’s private is shifting in complex ways, in terms of what people do, why they do it, how they do it, where they do it, and in terms of people’s relationships with their families, with their past, with the future, and with society. Blunt regulatory systems that inhibit access to private data or insist on some data being made public are no longer good tools for dealing with the post-digital age, the age in which computers and systems are so ubiquitous they have become almost invisible by being so embedded in our world.

Q: Has technology outstripped humankind’s ability to harness it?

Harper: You could say that. But that doesn’t mean that it has outstripped humanity’s ability to harness it permanently or absolutely, it’s just that we need to hold the reins on our technology effectively. We can’t let them slip. I think we have let them slip a little bit, but we’ve still got our hands on them.

Q: What’s next?

Harper: We want to raise public attention, media attention, government awareness, and academic and educational institutions’ awareness to use this report as a device to get discussions going, to provoke longer books and reports and conferences and sessions, and to direct the scientific research community in a more purposeful direction. We can raise the issues, and, hopefully, the issues will have legs of their own.

Q: Given the challenges that people will be facing as their lives get increasingly intertwined with technology, what gives you hope that we will be able to negotiate this transition effectively?

Harper: I think the research and academic communities are bracing themselves to deal with these issues. I think corporate research, for example Microsoft, is creating a space to deal with these issues. I think government is beginning to recognize the importance of these issues. I think the transformations that are visible in everyday life now are making people begin to wonder.

I’m optimistic because we are fortunate enough to be able to assemble some of the best minds from around the world, through events like this, to help address these issues and to alert other parts of society to think about these things. We’re fortunate to be able to lead these debates, because they’re important and they’re leading us somewhere where we want to be.

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