A friendly experience?

I am told by an artificial voice and a digital screen at the Phoenix airport that it is America’s friendliest airport.

And since I have the curse of a designer’s mind, which means auditing all of the experiences I come across and evaluating their efficacy and humanity, I thought deeply about this.

Friendly is defined as:

Being kind and helpful

Not being harmful

The airport could have been designated America’s friendliest due to effective systems and a frictionless design, providing the necessary amenities and/or because the actual humans in the airport were kind and helpful. Perhaps all of these. In fact upon further investigation I learned that human volunteers to help people wayfind was one of the reasons. I didn’t see them but that sure sounds great.

I am sure the artificial voice and digital screens were just promoting this honor that the airport has received.

But the announcement of the human trait of friendliness by a non-human voice created dissonance within me.

I have been leading design projects for 25 years and always advocate for the experiences to be a manifestation of the brand attributes of an organization - which always always have a benevolent focus and provide a positive aspirational aim. Those brand attributes can become design principles and “friendly”  is often one of them.  The question becomes how might we design something such that a person walks away feeling that the experience was friendly?

In pursuit of the answer, we leverage color theory, content tone, photos or illustrations of people smiling, transparency of information, responsiveness, and expectation setting, to name a few. Hopefully, we also make access to human customer service seamless for the people who are dead ended, are frustrated, lost and confused (See http://glance.cx for a co trying to solve for this.)

In the best cases we speak with people who are served by the experience about what friendliness means to them, co-creating the experience with them and then evaluating with them whether the experience is hitting all of the important notes.

But as we increasingly design for self-service and AI based experiences, ascribing human traits to them, it makes me wonder. I believe we should consider not ascribing human attributes to not human things; products, technologies and experiences. People are friendly, products are not, bits and bites are not, self service experiences are not. People have pronouns, but perhaps AI should not.

AI presents profound promise to improve the human condition, but I don’t believe it could or should be designed to become us. It begs the question about what human attributes or aspects of the human experience should be reserved for humans and held sacred? For example, do you want a bot holding your hand as you die? I can imagine some situations where this could be a good thing, being a better alternative to no one or the one you would prefer. But, in a world where people are increasingly feeling isolated, frustrated and left behind, I believe the only cure is relationship. People still need people. How might we leverage tech to bring people closer together as opposed to farther apart? More empathic as opposed to more polarized? More vibrant as opposed to more disenfranchised and “optimized out of the system”? I think these are questions worth considering and amongst the exploration of the ethical creation and application of AI.