Cassell Posts on World Economic Forum Blog

In a World Economic Forum blog entry, HCII Director Justine Cassell says technological innovations won’t reach their potential for solving human concerns if developers fail to understand the goals, fears and experiences of the humans who will use those innovations.

She writes:

“At the Human-Computer Interaction Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, we are fond of asking our students to repeat the following mantra: ‘the user is not like me, the user is not like me.’ This simple phrase reminds our brilliant students that brilliance is not enough, that our most fabulous technological innovations may founder if we do not take into account the real people we are designing for, their cares and concerns, their desires and needs, the problems they face and their hopes for the future.

“For those of us who develop technologies to try to address human concerns and make the world a better place, it is essential to understand the nature of the human in human concerns.”