The 10th edition of Web2day took place this year in Nantes from June 13-15. The “Digital Spring Break” dedicated to professionals and digital enthusiasts have kept all its promises with more than 5000 festival-goers, nearly 300 speakers from France and the rest of the world, 200 talks and a 3500-square meter exhibition village.

During these three days, the festival-goers discovered a virtual world through which they could drive race cars on a circuit of Hypercube VR, fight against opponents with lasers, and learn to pilot a drone in the aviary of the Parisian startup Drone Indoor. A common thread connected the talks during these three days: to design more ethical services for a more human world via the #TechForGood concept.

The utopia of digital responsibility and the augmented human

The conferences began with Sandrine Roudaut, the researcher, writer and co-founder of Alternité, who invited us to reflect on the future of digital and its consequences.

“We are becoming more and more assisted, in autopilot mode! We think less. Digital technology relieves us of our choices, our responsibilities and the responsibilities of our choices. Man organizes his obsolescence by machines.”Sandrine Roudaut

This invitation to awareness is even more disturbing: Based on “its energy consumption, if the Internet was a country, it would be the 6th most polluting country in the world. Children are exploited to collect rare metals to manufacture smartphones; in 2038, all copper resources will be exhausted.

Paradoxically, this alarming climate could allow us to create radical innovations because any bit of progress, every leap of humanity, could ultimately help lead to some utopia. Utopia arises from two things: great ambition and high clarity. Roudaut then outlines some alternatives, such as working on energy-saving biomimetic solutions or installing mini-data centers.

Transhumanism was another topic raised by the speakers this year. It’s a cultural and intellectual movement advocating the use of science and technology to improve the human condition, including the increase in physical and mental characteristics of human beings. Far from being a fantasy, some companies already resort to neural interfaces, robotics, and exoskeletons (eye, ear, muscle, artificial skin). Fabien Selanne, CTO of Sogeti, also touched on the gap between fantasy and reality stemming from using science and technology to enhance humans.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): What impact our business?

We are witnessing the growing development of artificial intelligence through chatbots, smart speakers and other personal assistants. These services are becoming more and more important in our lives due to how useful they can be. Paradoxically, they blur more and more the border between man and machine, between the enslaver and the slave.

Guillaume Champeau, Qwant’s Ethics and Public Relations Director, invited us to reflect on the ethical questions raised by these assistants by projecting the consequences of our technological and usage choices.

Using the example of Google Duplex presented at Google I/O in 2018, which allows the AI to autonomously make an appointment at the hairdresser, Champeau analyzed the use and signs of human language by the machine. He concluded that it could potentially take control of our schedules and exploit our weaknesses to push us to make purchases.

In parallel, AI is beginning to compete with the main tasks of the designer. Patrick Maruejouls, Founder and Design Lead at Haigo, demonstrated some examples where AI could replace human intervention:

• Autodesk AI already generates thousands of 3D object instances from simple constraints that won’t be possible to do for a human
• The AI allows the imagining forms without cultural references and cognitive biases that the designer could introduce into his work.
• The A/B testing bots will make it happen in the future to improve the interfaces’ efficiency without a designer in real-time.

“If your solution is only to alleviate the symptoms of a deeper problem, you are more likely to calcify a problem and make it more difficult to resolve.”Patrick Maruejouls

AI could, however, leave us much more time to focus on the essentials and better define the issues to find the best solutions. As such, the designer took the example of anti-homeless furniture in Paris, which allows subway travellers to sit for a short time but doesn’t allow them to lie down for a long time.

The solution quoted here does not solve the problem at the root, which would be to understand why there are so many homeless people in Paris. Patrick Maruejouls thinks that AI could thus help to make us act more human.

Personal data: a business issue?

In line with society issues, the topic of GDPR (General Regulation on Data Protection) has been analyzed in many aspects. The data produced daily by our lives, our uses, our objects, are a subject full of insights, provided we know how to exploit it.

Indeed, many of us wish to preserve our privacy. Paradoxically, we share daily selfies on social media, our health data via sports activity apps, our shopping lists via connected remote controls, our musical tastes through online playlists and even the tone of our voice via smart speakers like Google Home, Cortana on Windows or Alexa from Amazon.

Two schools of thought compete here:

• Those who wish to monetize our data
• Those who want to manage our data collectively

In the first category, there is Gaspard Koenig, president of ‘Génération Libre’, who wonders about the heritage of digital data.

We often accept the terms and conditions we use, without really having read them beforehand. We transfer our data (name, date of birth, address, health data, travel, eating habits, etc.) to third parties for whom we don’t know the purpose. The apparently free services offered to us for this transfer of our data costs us the total enjoyment of our private life.

‘Génération Libre’ offers to end this waste of our data by introducing ownership rights over personal data. To sum up, they propose charging the platforms for the transfer of the rights of our data.

‘The goal is to make the individual the legal owner of his data. Each person could sell his data to the platforms; or otherwise, pay for the given services and keep his private data.’Gaspard Koenig

In the second category, there is Ludovic Riffault, data visualization designer at Dataveyes who offers universal use of personal data to “make the invisible visible.”

In his talk, he explained how data visualization would measure these intangible, ambient phenomena and sometimes reveal unexpected information.

He thus experimented with this idea in the Paris subway. Equipped with a microphone attached to his backpack, he recorded the noise level and its variations (noisy trains, construction work near the tracks, etc.). Then he transcribed everything using data visualization and audible music notes which allowed him to determine the busiest subway lines associated with travelers’ level of stress and fatigue.

By making our data ‘open-source,’ Riffault offers to create new services or improve the existing ones for the common good to move from #QuantifiedSelf to #QuantifiedSelves.

Design for snapshot

We usually design products considering user needs and business issues by cutting the experience into three phases: before/during/after use. But with the advent of technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR), user behaviour is changing. Before, it was exceptional to be connected. Now it is exceptional to be disconnected. These before/after phases have disappeared, leaving us with a continuously connected experience. Product designer Noémie Lecorps offered to explore new methods to apprehend instant design by customizing content and navigation at specific times.

Thomas Buvignier, a product owner at Bewizyu, showed that by working on the small details of an app and micro use cases, it’s possible to bring real aspects into a virtual app.

The #TechForGood concept discussed throughout the festival allowed us to question our technological uses and their limits and to consider the future of a more human world.