Society 5.0 herald the coming of the ubiquity of technological systems in our environment. Those systems won’t be an option, as they will become one of the primary ways we will interact with our environment.

Designers, especially UX Designers, have made great strides in the past decade to create products that are increasingly more intuitive. Fierce competition made sure that products with clunky controls would be cast aside by paying customers. As this reality inches closer, we need to start addressing it.

The road ahead, however, will take far more from designers than better interfaces targeted toward a techno-savvy public. All types of designers will need to make their work far more accessible than ever before. UX Design (that’s user experience design to the uninitiated) will continue to grow as a field, even faster than before. Other areas of design, from system design to architectural design will need to pay attention to these new publics are design accordingly.

Society 5.0 is bringing advanced technological tools to the masses, trying to ease and better their lives. We are talking about self-driving vehicles, IoT-backed remote medical consultations at home, AI-assisted data analytics to feed you better tailored information and much more. Society 5.0 aims to address the plight of many oft-neglected segments of our population (such as the elderly or the handicapped) by giving new technology-driven opportunities to receive care and participate in all aspects of society.

What does accessibility mean?

Intuitive

Decades later we still make jokes about how complicated it was to set the time on a VCR. Designers of all stripes have learned since that nice, thick user manuals are thrown in remote drawers without being read and then instantly forgotten, or find a new life as door stoppers.

Today’s designs must be intuitive. Either people should understand instantly how to use the item, or the object itself should show the user how to operate it. This intuitive design becomes even more crucial than it is today as technology will permeate everyone’s life more than ever before.

Just think about self-driving cars. Yes, there will be training to use them and reading the manual will be important. But not everyone will take the time or have the leisure to do so. If there’s an emergency and you have to use a self-driving vehicle without proper training, hope that it can guide you through its safe operation.

Convivial

Intuitive design is one thing, but we still need people to want to use the tools made available to them.

Simplicity, speed, and rewarding experience is the only way to make sure whatever tool or service we create will actually be used. Creating a remote system to allow low-mobility elderly people to get medical checkups from home isn’t helping if they refuse to use it.

This also applies to people. Managers making themselves more accessible and open to frank discussions offer convivial access. Welcoming discussion groups who keep a positive attitude and avoid falling into toxicity are another example.

Physical access

When we talk about physical accessibility, we usually conjure up images of wheelchair ramps and text magnification. In Society 5.0, which aims to include as many people as possible, it will need to be much more than that.

Whether it is to allow disabled people to participate in the workforce easily or to offer proper health monitoring at home to the elderly, we will need IoT-connected cyber-physical systems. Those systems need to be designed and made available.

Think about chairs that read your bio-signs and systems that translate brain impulses into digital commands to controls computers, self-driving vehicles, phones, and automated kitchens. All of these systems are currently in existences as prototypes or proofs-of-concept, but the lack designs created for general consumption leave them as mere dreams for the future for many people who would live much better lives with them. For all his prestige, even Steven Hawkins did not have access to those.

Just think of all the difference advanced 3D-printed prosthesis made. While some models include highly sophisticated electronic packages and cost a small fortune, it is possible to download some simpler models from the Internet to create new arms for kids for a few hundred dollars.

We are also now talking about exoskeletons allowing people to carry heavy charges for extended periods of time. When will similar constructs enable paraplegic people to walk again? We are not far.

The rise of DIY bio-hacking, especially for cybernetic implants, show a new realm of possibilities. People are replacing glass eyes with cameras and sensors. Now how can we combine that AR to close the remaining gap between reality and cyberpunk novels? People implant magnets to gain a new sense to feel magnetic and electrical currents. How can this be improved to gain direct, touch-less control of tools and systems around us?

When you take those new innovations into consideration, physical accessibility takes a whole new sense.

Digital access

It’s not just people interacting with systems anymore. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is on the rise: we are now living in a world where billions of devices are connected and talking to each other. That growth is not remotely done!

We are all aware of the rise of smart home gadgets, ranging from the useful to the pointless, and giving rise to creepy stories. In the medical field, 87% of organizations have adopted IoT systems for anything from remote monitoring to mechanized pills designed to deliver medication in specific parts of the body. There are examples like that in virtually every field.

Designing for both human and IoT connectivity is going to be a must. At the same time, simple connexions are not enough, and security must play a critical role (see Security, below).

Transparency

At its core, Transparency can mean availability of information.

I’m not advocating for total transparency of all information at all times (see Security below), but a lot of information is often restricted or inaccessible for no good reason.

I see four main barriers to transparency:

Power: There is power in controlling information. In many jobs, people use that control to justify their continued employment by turning themselves into gatekeepers. In some instances, people will restrict access to information strictly to create unnecessary power dynamics. We can find these information tyrants pretty much everywhere.

Bureaucratic process: From pretend security processes who make legitimate access to information difficult but do nothing to slow down criminal access, institutionalized lack of trust and ridiculously long chains-of-command, all the way to substantial bureaucratic processes that keep growing without ever being questioned, so much information would be freely available to you if you could just provide that damned permit A-38…

Lack of communication skills: Clear communication is a skill. As such, it isn’t innate but must be learned and can be improved throughout our entire lives. And yet it is something we neglect regularly.

The key to communication is to stop assuming the other person will understand what we are trying to communicate and try a bit of empathy. How can we make whatever information we communicate easier to access, simple to understand, clear in content and actually useful to the other party?

Fear: Humans are a fearful species. We tend to be paranoid for no reason, or the wrong reasons. Companies hide financial problems from employees for fear they will stop working. Bosses hide mistakes for fear that their subalterns will lose trust in them. Parents tell tall tales about the upstate farm where the dog has gone to avoid talking about death with their kids. When did this acts born of fear actually made any situation better? We don’t only delaying the inevitable, we actually make it worse.

We are also pretty good at inducing fear into other to shift their attention from what they really should be fearing. Want an example? Equifax, the large company that holds pretty much all your credit information, will frighten you with how you can reveal your information to bad people and try to sell you products to make that information more secure… all the while being themselves hacked through a mixture of negligence and stupidity, giving away all our information.

By creating transparency around information, we speed up processes, ease work, and avoid much guesswork that can lead to mistakes. Transparency reduces the senseless fears, and paranoid fantasy people have when they know you are hiding things from them.

Security

A critical part of the discussion on accessibility is the security around the information that you don’t want to share. Little things like personal information, passwords, confidential records, restricted access, you know, all those things that get hacked and stolen several times a week these days.

There are several challenges in front of the security experts:

• how to make systems generally more secure while staying easy to use?
• how to make sure sensitive information remain accessible when without being at risk of being stolen?
• how can smaller organizations protect themselves from well-funded, government-backed hackers?
• how to remove people as the weakest link in any security system?,
• how can private citizens protect themselves if big corporations that require their private information can’t keep it secure? (again, think of the Equifax leak as an example).

The security issue has large communities of experts already debating and exploring new avenues to improve security. As citizens, will the custodians of our private information get on board and listen to them, or just ignore the issue as it would imply additional expenses? We need to make to send a message with our wallets and aim to work only with those organizations who take all the necessary steps to protect us.

Designing for new publics

When high technology permeates everyone’s environment, whole swaths of the population who were often ignored or addressed in “future updates… probably” are now part of the core public.

Not only these people won’t be able to avoid those technological systems anymore, but many of them will have to be explicitly designed for them.

The physically impaired

Physical impairment encompasses a wide range of conditions.

We got motor issues, from a broken limb to quadriplegia, to neurodegenerative afflictions attacking coordination or causing tremors. We got sensory input issues, from color-blindness, partial or complete blindness, muteness, deafness, loss of sense of touch. There’s a lot more, but those can already get us thinking.

While we certainly can’t account for all impairment for all systems at all times, we still have the option of addressing the impairment itself and give the afflicted person better access to a much wider range of systems.

The mentally impaired

When I was younger, my grandmother took care of a group of people with intellectual disabilities. She had them start their own small business, creating crafted items to be sold in local stores to finance fun activities of their choice. The activities were nice, sure, but it was nothing compared to the pride they had every time they saw their items for sale in a real store. Like everyone else, it was vital for them to contribute to the world, to matter. Society 5.0 believes they just need the right tools to do so.

People with intellectual disability aren’t the only ones who could be considered “mentally impaired.” Several afflictions, many brain injuries or neurodegenerative conditions fall into this categories. Hell! Being drunk isn’t called being impaired for nothing! Still, all of them will need to move around, as well as to operate systems in their house and out in the world.

How do you design for people who have trouble with complex operations? Or people who can’t remember instructions after a minute or two? Or people who are unable to read?

The elderly

The elderly tend to be a bit of the two previous categories but in a different package.

More and more of our senior citizens are well enough used to technology by now. However, as age progress, even the tech-savvy ones can become confused or merely insecure about using unfamiliar systems.

Our society is aging and fast. Not only we had fewer children in the past five decades, but more people are living longer. A rapidly aging population was one of the main drivers behind Japan’s Society 5.0 reflexion, and the rest of the world isn’t that far behind. Elder care is going to be one of the most critical aspects of our society from now on.

Children

Our lovable little monsters are all too often treated like second-class citizens. We either design specifically for them, or we assume their parents will take care of things for them.

However, as technology will spread to all aspects of our living environment, kids are going to interact with those new systems continually. Kids can be rough with electronics, inquisitive with new systems and love to learn to do things by themselves (well, when they want to). My own daughter can’t read yet, and when she uses a child-restricted tablet designed for especially for young kids, she will still find her way to eBay or fiddle with the tablet’s settings. Every. Single. Time.

Kids play outside, visit shopping malls, use washrooms. They do a lot of the same things adult do and should be able to use many of the same systems too. They can’t only have their own versions, as duplicating systems everywhere would soon be cost-prohibitive.

Animals

We have a lot of pets and, in an automated world, some systems will have to be designed for their needs too. Even wild animals, such as raccoons and coyotes, are now getting used to life in urbanized areas. Better tracking and control of their movements will allow us to design our cities better to accommodate these new “citizens” that, whether we like it or not, are here to stay.

As research demonstrates that animals are more complex and intelligent than we first thought, as a society, we will need to recognize their needs better and cater for their recreational needs.

Robots and other cyber-physical systems

Finally, all of our new robots, toys, and tools have some needs that must be fulfilled if we want them to serve us properly.

Machines have a variety of need as significant as ours, larger even if we consider that they require more maintenance and an increasingly large number of them will require to be connected to other systems.

We tend to design those machines themselves, but not their environments. Autonomous mobile robots are still a curiosity, apart from the odd exception (like those robotic vacuum cleaners), but this will change faster than we think. Fully human-like androids are still far in the future, meaning that between now and then we need to design for somewhat mobile, somewhat autonomous, somewhat intelligent machines.

Get involved in the discussion

Society 5.0, while making a lot of exciting promises, involves quite a lot of challenges that are all too often glossed over. Accessibility and all of what that means for the design industry is but one of those challenges.

The best designers of tomorrow are those who will start exploring these new challenges today. We are at the dawn of an era of new possibilities.

At Hivernité, a Montreal’s think tank with a focus on reinventing our world for the era of Society 5.0, these discussions involving the experts of the field, both veteran and new, are quite important. If you are interested in participating, I invite you to keep an eye on our website to see when and how you can contribute.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

We are now at the dawn of the fifth stage of human society. This is a big deal. 

Like all society stage before it, this one is driven by the emergence of game-changing technologies from the fourth industrial revolution. This time its significant advances in biotech, in artificial intelligence, in quantum computing, in cloud and fog computing, the Internet-of-Things, cyber-physical systems, and nanotech. We are moving from technologies we use a tool to control our environment, toward technology as our environment. 

We are talking about a revolution . More than slow progress, we re seeing a cascade of innovations and significant breakthroughs in science and techs. It means a shift powerful enough it profoundly affect all facets of our society. It means about half the job types of today will be replaced by occupations that don’t even exist yet. It means that interfacing human and machines will become commonplace (for medical, augmentation or control reasons). Biotech breakthrough is accelerating, helping us transcend our limits and gain the upper hand of some serious illnesses.

In 2016, Japan has proposed an initiative dubbed Society 5.0 to purposely redesign many elements of their society using the advances of the fourth industrial revolution in order to serve its people better. 

This is something important. 

Most governments content themselves to react to current problems by offering immediate band-aid solutions to appease their constituents. When a government prefers to artificially sustain a company that has no hope of being competitive and turning a profit ever again to “save jobs”, or when a government issues powerful restrictive measures because it doesn’t really know how to deal with emerging technology, it doesn’t prepare its society for the future. Instead of addressing the real issue and building for the future, and It only creates an illusion of a solution, an illusion of safety. That company will have to close someday, and its employees won’t be better off then. Or those regulations will be worked around in no time by the honest proponents of the emerging technology (the less-than-honest won’t even wait that long). 

What Japan is doing is facing what’s coming, and trying to incorporate those changes in their society in a positive way. They are doing it proactively and are working with the creators of those technological advances as well as with futurists to design a better future. Regulations will happen, but to shape rather than block. The approach isn’t perfect yet (as cryptocurrency proponents will attest), but the will is there. 

It’s about people

Back in 2011 in Germany a workgroup proposed a plan named Industry 4.0 to address how the manufacturing industry could harness new technologies. The discussions around Industry 4.0 have evolved and spread far beyond Germany since then, helping the transition toward “smart factories” and better value-chain worldwide. 

Society 5.0 is built along the same lines: part high-level plan and guidelines, part workspace for discussions. The idea is to find how we can use technology to better the welfare of people and the environment they live in (both living and working environments, as well as THE environment). 

With a rapidly aging population, depleting workforce, loss of quality of life, energy and resource sustainability issues, as well as transportation challenges, these concern are very close to home for the Japanese society. Elsewhere some of those issues are less pressing, but not by much, and we still need to address them. 

One of the key element is to integrate technology with our environment better so it becomes seamless. Not only this will help remove barriers for large sections of the population (not everyone is tech-savvy), but by making technology more or less invisible, it stops being about the tech itself and can become more about its beneficiaries. 

Technology is meant to improve on our abilities and free us from repetitive and lower-value work, to allow us to take care of more important things. It was always the goal, and it has been a reality for entire classes of people. But that technology is imperfect and require plenty of humans to maintain it, analyze its output, and generally create value from it. Now we have reached a point where technology can take care of most of that work for us. 

We are not done talking about Society 5.0

The Japanese plan for Society 5.0 gives us an exciting view of how technology can affect our lives for the better in fields such as mobility, healthcare, food, agriculture, manufacturing, energy and disaster prevention. However, it is incomplete as it doesn’t cover employment or concepts such as personal meaning in the new society. I don’t believe it to be an oversight, but rather a space left open for discussion and the initiation of new ideas. 

What we need to make sure of, as a society, is that we don’t become irrelevant in the face of that technology. In the long run, we won’t be as we will find new areas where we will excel above machines. But it the short term whole swats of the population are in danger of being caught unprepared by those changes. It happened before, with each industrial revolution. We need to figure out now what we should do to help people find relevance, prosperity and meaning during the changes, rather than loss and despair. 

The need for a meaningful existence isn’t just for people who will risk being left behind in this new world, but also for the who will benefit from it the most. Just think about it: let’s say new technology removes the need for you to work, take care of most chores and add 30 years of productivity to your life. Just like a new retiree, you start by enjoying that freedom like a vacation. However, before long comes the big question: “What now?”. 

We, humans, need meaning. We talk about happiness a lot, but meaning is far more critical to our well-being and will bring enough happiness for us to be content. Traditionally what we do for a living has given us some meaning, family has provided another part, community another and religion too. The more of these elements you remove, the more depression, feeling of emptiness and solitude emerge. However, as our society changes, we need to either redefine and re-acquired those elements providing meaning, AND find brand new ones to replace those we move away from. Hobbies, travels, money and new experiences can be enriching, but they are not meaning, they are not our “WHY”. 

As part of the Society 5.0 discussion, we need to address the subject of meaning and how it can evolve. We need to explore new paths for it, paths that will capitalize on our modern technological paradigm. There is still a place for people to move our world forward, discover new things and make life better. This opportunity is not reserved for an elite few: the world of Society 5.0 increasingly provides more of us with the possibility to engage and become a positive force in our immediate environment, or the whole world. 

Being part of the discussion

Most discussions about Industry 4.0 have only involved business and industry professional, but Society 5.0 is entirely different in its nature and should include the voice of futurists, philosophers, historians, tech professionals, social professionals, blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, no-collar workers, entrepreneurs and, well, pretty much everyone. It makes sense since we are all going to be affected. 

The questions are deceptively simple: “Looking at what’s coming, where do we want to go as a society?”, “How do we find meaning when what we know is replaced by something new?”, “How can we leverage our new technological paradigm to create a better world for all?”, “How can we prepare and help others prepare?”. 

In 2017, to find answers to those questions, I founded Hivernité: a small, think tank dedicated to finding ways to help our society become aware, to evolve and adapt to Society 5.0. It is still in its early days, but it has spawned a small ecosystem of projects aimed at educating people and opening their minds to new possibilities. We are discussing meaning, rethinking the workplace, system thinking & ecosystem design, developing human potential and more. It has been a demanding, rocky, but ultimately one of the most satisfying year of my life. I have found my “why”. 

You don’t need a think tank to participate in the discussion. Just look around you. What things (work, services, opportunities) might disappear and how can you help replace them by something more adapted to the realities of tomorrow? You don’t even need to know the answers just yet. Start the discussion, and you will be surprised by the potential for positive change that will emerge.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca