Designing for Human-Machine Consciousness

Intelligent Cooperation: Assistive, Affective, and Adaptive

AI-driven products are now capable of truly cooperative relationships with users. AI is the defining conscious technology of this decade, and it underpins intelligent services that engender trust, relatability, and connection. Intelligent systems, including neural networks that support generative AI, are inspiring an array of new, cooperative capabilities.

Conscious experience design applies human-centered design approaches to the creation of intelligent products and services, ensuring that AI effectively complements, simplifies, and enhances human experience. To balance AI-driven solutions, we must conduct new research into human expectations of autonomy. Data insights and advocacy frameworks are necessary to guide the ways in which intelligent systems process and contextually interpret data in making human-centric decisions.

In an optimal relationship between users and AI, products will evolve as people find new ways of leveraging them in their work and creative processes. AI can adapt and learn to cooperatively assist users in whatever ways are most valuable to them.

Immersive Connection: Spatial, Sensory, and Seamless

Immersive virtual worlds will play a role in our future, but mass adoption is likely to be somewhat further out. In the short term, immersive computing will focus on blended experiences that are spatial, sensory, and seamless. Apple’s Vision Pro and Vision OS mark a transformative shift, providing a more natural blending of our physical surroundings and digital information. These spatial computing technologies, along with similar advancements, will further blur barriers and enable more genuine experiences.

With machines gaining greater capabilities, they can now intuitively sense and forge connections in more authentic ways, empowering people to seamlessly interact and express emotions across both physical and digital spaces. Drawing on multisensory interactions, spatial contexts, and seamless ecosystems, UX designers will create immersive experiences that adapt to people's needs, transporting them to the next level of natural interactions and connections.

These new paradigms require deeper insights into sensory design and spatial computing. Conscious experience design applies immersive design approaches to the creation of natural user interfaces that engage multiple senses and the full range of human emotions to choreograph real-time, holistic, authentic, 360-degree experiences.

Systemic Relationships: Communal, Confident, and Continuous

Distributed, Web 3.0 networks, block-chain technology, and the sharing economy are giving rise to a new era of systemic relationships. As we weave conscious systems into the fabric of our everyday life, everything becomes a part of the system, turning products into services and services into systems. We are seeing a shift from closed, proprietary systems to open, decentralized networks of resources and collaboration spaces. To ensure balance and security, UX designers must think more systematically in defining the nature of and structuring relationships across these interdependent systems.

The promise of Web 3.0 and block-chain is the ultimate trust that a completely trustless system can deliver. This bold, but necessary promise assumes that a system of fail-safe computers secures users’ sensitive data, activities, and personal preferences—a system that no single entity or community can control. As we put more checks and balances in place and users become more savvy about what information they share and where they share it, people’s confidence in these digital systems will increase.

Conscious experience design applies human psychology and systemic thinking to motivate positive behaviors and achieve optimal flexibility and equilibrium across interdependent systems and social institutions. It considers the broad implications across all the interconnected parts, structuring systems to support evolution, sustainability, and balance.

Human Ethics: Essential, Enlightening, and Empowering

People are reevaluating their priorities and focusing on issues and activities that align with their values and preferences. Their desire for ethical services and products that are inclusive, enlightening, and empowering is defining what people deem to be essential.

To keep in step with users, UX designers must evaluate each interaction against its essential value. People want products and services that empower them, connect them to others, and let them prioritize the activities and relationships that they deem to be most valuable.

Ethical design practices ensure that the decisions that conscious systems make are inclusive, positive, and empowering. Human-ethics research and the creation of ethical frameworks are now fundamental means of capturing human insights and guiding the ways in which businesses make decisions about technologies that can support individual and collective human progress. To ensure that digital experiences support core human needs for the benefit of humanity and the world in which we live, ethical decision-making frameworks and resolutely prosocial principles are necessary.

The most successful companies are actively evaluating the impact of their solutions beyond the bottom line. When people find value, they return value to the companies that deliver the most value to them.

Looking Toward the Future of Design in a More Conscious Era

In the next decade, conscious experience design will be a guiding force for success in business and human life. I look forward to holding a discourse with you on this topic through this column.