A human-centred approach to digital technology

We are driving digital innovation by prioritising human needs and values

The Challenge

Is there a risk of us descending into a ‘digital darkness’? Will technology results in a loss of face to face communication?

Professor Matt Jones, believes there is a risk and believes a human-centred approach to digital technologies will help us to prevent this and help combat the ‘rise of the robot.’

The method

Professor Jones and his team have travelled extensively to remote rural communities in places such as South Africa and India to work with people there in developing new human-based technologies. The team are working with a range of stakeholders including IBM and Microsoft and most recently with the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay to explore technology for emergent users in Mumbai.

Professor Jones and his team visited Mumbai, with a prototype of a speech-based system, similar to Alexa or Google Home, and developed from previous visits to Mumbai with the people there. The people that asked the device a question would be given the option of having a human answer if they weren’t happy with the speech assistant technology answer.

Is there a ‘digital darkness’ descending?

Exploring Global Problems Podcast

The impact

The research revealed the sort of questions people wanted to ask, and also the quality of the answer provided by a human as opposed to that provided by a machine. It was found that about 40% of the time, people were satisfied with the automatic answer, but that 60% of the time they were much happier with their answer from a human being.
The team found that exploring the use of technology by different cultures around the world further raised the need to look at technology that will not just fit better into different community contexts but perhaps also provide new landscapes of digital opportunity for everyone; from people in Mumbai, to designers in California.

What our partners say

“Research and Innovation is the lifeblood of Microsoft and is fundamental to our mission ‘to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more.

“Our collaboration with Swansea has been great on multiple levels. The work itself presents an important perspective on the design and understanding of how computing and digital technologies may be used by, and on behalf of, people who are often not considered when we build these systems. This insight is critical for a global provider of technologies.

"As with any good collaboration, this work has led to new ideas and partnerships with the Swansea team that we are very excited about. The collaboration directly led to a new project focused on the collection of a disability-first dataset from low-resource settings in the global south.

"The Swansea project team is fantastic to work with – professional, smart researchers with their heads and hearts in the right place.”

Edward Cutrell, Senior Principal Research Manager, Microsoft

“I have followed the work of Swansea University through their Human Computer Interaction related publications for several years before we actually got an opportunity to collaborate. Swansea worked with colleagues at IIT Bombay and put street speakers (think Alexa or Siri) into shops in Dharavi, a suburb of Mumbai, which allowed customers to ask questions and receive answers from either a computer voice assistant or a human answerer.

"The last 12 years has been an absolute pleasure. We have learnt a lot in terms of research practices from Swansea University and shared many research outputs including papers, tools and learnings. I have been personally inspired by colleagues that have set up and run a successful lab that works on really challenging world problems.”

Professor Anirudha Joshi, IIT Bombay