Fit for People, Fit for Purpose: Designing Tech that Matters

I didn’t intend to pursue computer science. I was a midwife, focused on women-centered care in our private practice—my third career after trying social work and nursing. I only went to the faculty dean to discuss how I might focus my part-time science degree if I were to go full-time. I left his office as part of the first cohort in the new Information Technology (IT) program at the University of Queensland, and I finished my degree with a university medal.

My motivation was not love of technology. I believed an IT career might offer more flexibility once we started a family, instead of the family-unfriendly work schedule I had. As life has it, we never ended up having a family, but I did end up staying in IT. My computing degree enabled me to pursue my love of learning, travel the world, work in different places, and meet and work with amazing people. Most importantly, it enabled me to follow the drive to make a difference and explore the question of how to create better-fitting technologies for people and what is important to them.

In IT, there is no shortage of challenges in exploring this question. Every new technology phase since the late 1980s has been accompanied by increasingly complex challenges at increasing scales that are profoundly changing what it means to be human and who we are as a society. As technologists, we need to engage with these broader challenges. For example, the early days of distributed computing enabled people to collaborate together from a distance. My 1998 thesis was about a framework that offered a holistic way to approach collaborative systems design. And the challenges continued with the emergence of the World Wide Web, the proliferation of mobile devices and social media, ubiquitous computing, the Internet of Things, and our increasingly ‘smart’ environments. Now we are grappling with artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs). People-centered perspectives are more important than ever.

Yet it has always been a challenge trying to bring people-centered perspectives into software engineering and technology domains, and to have them valued, whether in computer science departments at universities or research organizations, or in software development companies. In the early 1990s, I worked in industry in London as ‘an experience modeler’—before user experience (UX) was the popular term. It took significant work to negotiate a role beyond giving a ‘usability tick’ to what was already built, and to demonstrate that the real value came from talking to and observing people first to better understand who and what we were designing for, and what could actually be useful for them. Then there was the challenge of how to translate deep insights from fieldwork into software design.

I have loved the variety in my career—taking people-centered perspectives in IT has meant working with diverse disciplinary perspectives as well as working in diverse domains. Over the years, I have been able to contribute to areas such as healthcare, education, accessibility, sustainability, design, software development, community, performance arts, the home, health and well-being, and more. In all this work, I have taken critical perspectives, thinking about how to make things better. Healthcare and aging has been a particular passion, asking the question, “What if we didn’t just treat aging as a decline process and an expensive societal problem to be solved, but thought about aging as a positive developmental process?” and “How can we promote better quality of life as defined by older people themselves, not just by the healthcare system?”

I recently finished up my ‘professor of technology of design and assessment’ role at TU Wien in Vienna due to mandatory retirement laws. One of the privileges has been working with amazing educators, researchers, and students. And it is these people doing our IT research and building our technology I am increasingly concerned about, especially given the growing levels of burnout driven in large part by our competitive metrics-focused evaluations in academia This matters. Technology is causing seismic shifts in society, and it needs us all to bring our best selves to this work. My people-centered focus continues now on how we can better support the people and cultures in which they work, so they can take care of designing better technologies. People matter.

Name
Geraldine Fitzpatrick

Background
Born and raised in Brisbane Australia, first generation student, now living in Austria.

Current Job Title/Employer
Prof.i.R., TU Wien in Vienna, Austria
Host of Changing Academic Life podcast series
Geraldine Fitzpatrick Consulting, Focus 20

Education
Masters of Applied Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology, University of East London, U.K.

Ph.D. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and B.Inf.Tech.(Hons.), University of Queensland, Australia