Mary Czerwinski, Research Manager of Visualization and Interaction Research at Microsoft Research, gave the graduation address at the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering's 2016 Graduation & Awards Ceremony.

Mary’s research focuses primarily on emotion tracking and information worker task management. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington, and a MA in Experimental Psychology from Ball State University. In 2010, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded Mary the CHI Lifetime Service Award, inducted her into the CHI Academy, and named her an ACM Distinguished Scientist. In 2016 she became an ACM Fellow, recognized for significant contributions to human-computer interaction and leadership in the CHI community. 

The full text of her graduation address is below.

Thank you so much for the introduction and for inviting me here on this momentous occasion to talk with all of you. It’s such a great celebration and I feel truly honored to be able to share it with you!

You know, I’ve been working in technology as a cognitive psychologist for around 25 years now. One of the main reasons I’ve loved my work so much is that technology is always changing. To track it really requires a commitment to lifelong learning in order to keep up with the pace of innovation. And like fashion, many key technologies come and go—because they aren’t quite ready for prime time for users, and then, once they have a more user-centered focus, they eventually come back and are quite successful. Just think about the initial products using speech recognition—early tablet computers and smart phones—things we take for granted now, but were so hard to use when they first emerged on the market. The cool thing is that, as a user experience researcher, you will get the opportunity to witness what didn’t work right first and make sure that the next time we get it right from the user’s perspective. Market failure, as it turns out, can be quite enlightening. But you have to have the tools to dissect the problem when you witness technological failure and know how to study what went wrong when deployed so that you can correct it.

That’s why you, graduates of University of Washington’s Human Centered Design and Engineering department, are perfectly trained to have a major impact on our collective future, and especially on how technology might guide that future.

I mean, what’s not exciting about tomorrow today? We already have intelligent agents that we can converse with and they’ll even do trivial tasks for us. We have self-driving cars that might keep us safer and allow us to make good use of our commutes. We have robotic surgical tools and augmented reality for hands free task assistance on complicated, 3D tasks. Machine learning is getting good enough to do anticipatory computing, where systems can know you and your behavioral patterns so well that they can suggest just in time interventions and suggestions to help you cope better with your day, your mood, your health, you name it.

So, with all of these technological advancements, why do we need graduates in Human Centered Design and Engineering? Aren’t artificial intelligence and machine learning taking over the world and threatening people’s jobs as modern press suggests? That is not my opinion.

I’m prone to say, back at my job at Microsoft Research, that you can throw all of the machine learning in the world at a human-computer interaction experience, but, unless you truly understand the human, you’re never going to get the user experience to be magical or even trustworthy. And, my own research has shown that, if an intelligent assistant isn’t obviously valuable right out of the box, users will stop using that technology within 20 minutes of trying it out.

So, thankfully, you have all been trained in how to understand the user, the user’s needs, values and goals. This will ensure that the design of our future socio-technical systems will benefit, not hurt, society. By doing the research into what actually inspires positive emotions and behavioral change for users, you have the opportunity to do so much good for society. We have massive, global issues that need to be dealt with by our generations. We are an aging population, with increased healthcare costs, a new era of information overload, housing crises, global warming. The list goes on and on. How can we persuade people to do not only what’s good for them, but for our larger, shared experience through technology? Only by understanding what excites and motivates humans, which means thoroughly understanding and supporting human values in technology design.

The discipline of human-centered design and engineering is not often taught in technology-oriented universities, but you’ve all chosen well to seek out a degree from the UW that provides this kind of training. It not only shows that you have passion for the human-technology equation, but that you had the good foresight to seek out an institution that is on the forefront of education around this discipline, which is after all, rather new as disciplines go. Well done!

You should know that, as you enter the workforce, you will have the opportunity to influence the mindset of those co-workers around you. They may not have been, as you were, schooled in user-centered design. This can be frustrating at times. But know that you never have to settle for arguments centered around an engineering opinion, because you’ve been trained to collect data from your users. And guess what? Engineers love data. It works for them. You can have an impact with converging lines of evidence around telling your user’s story. A workplace that consumes your user stories with excitement and seriousness is always going to be a great place to work, so seek those places out.

Oh, and before I forget, there are at least two factors key to longevity in this business. I already mentioned that engineers love numbers and data, so you are all set with that idea. But there are a couple of other things you need to keep in mind if you want to attract great people to work with you toward your human-centered design goals.

First, and I think most importantly, you need to seek out diverse partners, or embrace them if they seek you out. I’ve been extremely lucky to have technologists seek me out because I’m a psychologist. If someone seeks you out because of your background training, welcome them! They will likely be a great champion with and for you. I have amazing stories about partnerships I’ve been fortunate to forge throughout my career.

One example was from Gary Starkweather, the inventor of the laser printer and the original color display (yes, he added color to the monitor… please ask me how he was laughed out of the house about that design decision!). He is a brilliant man that used to often talk about how important it was to make mistakes, otherwise you clearly weren’t trying to do anything difficult or important. One day, Gary walked up to me and asked me if I would like to have a really big display, one with a true visual periphery. This was back in 1999 or so. Being that my background was in visual attention, I told him of course I’d like that. And he built me one. I think the only bigger displays were at NASA at the time, or maybe airplane flight simulators. Well it cost him about 20k, and he built me not one, but eventually 2. I was able to run experiments back then that no one else could do because he did that for me. And we learned so many things by accident—the productivity benefits of large displays, where notifications should go, input problems, gender differences when navigating 3D environments on those displays, etc. All because Gary thought a partnership between a display guru and a psychologist might be fun and productive.

So seek out great partners. The same thing happened to me with George Robertson. I was told he’d been asked by Bill Gates to build Windows in 3D. George thought there might be all kinds of interesting psychological issues surrounding a new design like that, and he brought me onto his team to figure those out. We spent years studying the relative benefits between 2D and 3D and learned so many guidelines that were actually relevant to the design of 2D interfaces using 3D animation, etc., for the company. We never shipped Windows in 3D, but the groundwork we laid in understanding 3D UI design was very useful to our community. And that’s another thing you need to learn when you go out into the real world. Technology you work very hard on doesn’t always succeed or even ship. That doesn’t mean that you didn’t do great work or learn from the experience. If you look at everything you do as an opportunity to learn as you go, you will do well indeed.

Secondly, remember that work and life need to be fun. I’ve had wonderful engineers choose to work with my teams because we enjoy what we do so much. Part of a lifelong love of learning is not taking yourself too seriously and always being willing to step back, crack a joke and be humble about what it is you are doing and where you stand in the world. And it’s true that there are no straight paths to what you’ll accomplish in your career. If you’d have told me that I’d be working at Microsoft when I got my PhD I think I’d have laughed out loud! Everyone’s life includes an element of chance. You need to be prepared for that one big opportunity that might be right around the corner. Stay flexible and open minded because life and work are so much more fun when you do.

Whether we fall in love with our virtual assistants, meditate in our self-driving cars or regulate our emotions more responsibly through psychological interventions on our phones, I think I see a brighter tomorrow. And I want to live to be 300 years old so that I can witness all the good you will all do for our future.

So get out there, collect your evidence! Be user-centered forensic! Study humans and technology and ensure that our technological symbiosis is an ethical, moral, pleasing and responsible one.

With that, congratulations to the students, their families and social networks, and the amazing faculty and staff that UW’s HCDE program has assembled to guide you on this journey. You have all accomplished something truly remarkable but I’m here to say that your work has only just begun. The responsibility is now in your hands, for which I feel very confident and proud!