Industry 4.0 machines

DW: How important is it for people to understand the digital world we're in? The world seems to be marching ahead with this idea of creating an "Industry 4.0," but many people don't know what that means and how it will affect their lives.

Jörg Niesenhaus: We know of problems faced by people who operate machines, people who see the machines as "black boxes," and it's getting worse, because the machines have started ordering new materials for themselves and the operators don't know what's going on.

You're talking about the Internet of Things - the idea of your refrigerator ordering milk without your even knowing about it.

Exactly. That's happening in industry as well - large machines ordering things from other machines. And for the operator, it's hard to keep in touch with the machines. It may sound a bit strange, but it's important for them to know what's happening and to know what their role is in this Industry 4.0. We talk a lot about the technological aspects, but the role of humans in this process is not part of the discussion.

How can humans interact better with their machinery?

We've learnt that it's important to offer more transparency for the user - the machine has to tell the user what's happening. We develop interfaces, so our approach is to show a lot of these abstract processes and give users a platform to understand what the machines are doing, and to be able to react. What the user doesn't want to feel is, "the machine is showing me it's doing something, but I can't interrupt it; I can't change it." It's really important to show people that they have an impact - that they can change things. Our challenge with user interfaces is to provide an interface for the user to communicate with the machines and to understand the machines.

You want to soften the machine. But how do you do that? Do I have to understand the machine's inner workings, or the code behind the program?

Probably not the code, but the reasons why things are happening and why they cannot be interrupted…that, for instance, your computer files could be damaged if you hit the power button while a process is running. Some systems tell you that something scary might happen if you interrupt a process. But the reasons are not provided. So we need to tell users why things happen.

Your company, Centigrade, develops new and existing interfaces. Where are you going with your research?

The more data we get, the harder it gets to distinguish what is important for the user. We want to offer mechanisms for users to be able to search for the important issues, to learn more about the user, to know more about their needs, and to offer them the right information at the right time. This is partly to do with the interfaces and partly to do with the algorithms. But in the next few years this is where we need to focus research.

How did we reach a point where people don't understand what's going on and where even the programmers don't understand what the users need to understand? Surely, programmers are humans, too. So why do they find it so hard?

It's because the software has improved and keeps getting more intuitive - even for programmers. Programmers use processes that the system provides, and sometimes the programmers don't know what they are using. They know that a particular method will solve a particular problem, but what's happening in the background is closed to them as well. While it might increase efficiency, it can create a new barrier of understanding, so that even the programmers lack a complete overview of the program. But this is part of the evolution of programming tools.

Is it important for people to learn how to code or do you think there's an argument for us to pull back somewhat, that we should have, in a technological sense, a forced "greening" of our digital lives, to stop us using computers in every aspect of our lives?

I think it's important to know how things work, as a general competence, like the social networks. But it's also important to know how all the technology works - how your iPhone works, what happens behind all those fancy apps. And programming is part of this. So I would argue for more programming in schools, so kids get a better understanding of how systems work, and then they can ask more critically, "Is this the right way to do things? And should we use more or less technology in this specific area of our lives?" This is part of the decision process, having more knowledge about what happens behind the fancy front-end that you keep touching with your fingers.

Dr. Jörg Niesenhaus is a Senior User Experience Engineer at Centigrade GmbH. Before moving to Centigrade, Niesenhaus spent 11 years in the computer games industry, working for games makers Blue Byte, Similis and Ubisoft.