Stefanie Hutka // What Your Machines Should Do: The Science and Strategy of Human-Centered Automation

Join us Tuesday, November 3rd at 5:30 PM for an evening with Stefanie Hutka, design leader and author of What Your Machines Should Do: The Science and Strategy of Human-Centered Automation. Stefanie has spent her career asking a question that sounds simple until you try to answer it: what should automation actually do, and for whom?

Her talk centers on what she calls the "Automation Strategy Gap," the yawning distance between an organization's AI ambitions and its actual readiness to do something useful with them. It is, she argues, alarmingly wide. Drawing on human factors, cognitive science, and management theory, her book makes the case that AI is the latest chapter in a long history of automation, and that the durable lessons were always there, we just got distracted by the hype. One particularly useful provocation: automation accelerates the system you already have. Which means the first thing worth mapping is the beliefs driving your organization before you automate anything at all.

This is a book launch talk. It will be an essential conversation for anyone who has sat through a roadmap presentation where "AI-powered" was doing a lot of heavy lifting where a strategy should have been.

This event is free and open to the public.

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​Design Field Notes is a lecture series where we invite the public to the UC Berkeley campus for conversations with designers, makers and artists who are contributing to shaping the future through design.

If you require accommodation for a disability for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Jacobs Institute staff at jacobsinstitute@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.