Human-centric design is shaping 6G thinking

“At this early stage for 6G, rather than obsessing over all the components, let’s focus seriously on what outcomes we want from it,” says Camille Mendler, chief analyst with consulting firm Omdia.

While we may be some years away from any actual deployment, 6G, it appears, is already shaping up towards a more human-centric design. The emphasis of 6G – indeed of future telecoms services in general – looks set to move on from being primarily about networks and services to being centred more on the experience of the user. Developers and entrepreneurs may have an opportunity to reimagine the whole communications market on new, people-focused lines.

“Some of these will be industrial outcomes,” continues Mendler, “such as, how can 6G improve manufacturing output? But equally there is value in looking at human outcomes. For example, how can 6G help to make humans more aware of dangers in the workplace? Can 6G help make offices better places to work in? Then we can work back from that and design it right.”

Certainly some 6G futurists expect the technology to usher in digital sensory experiences for humans, allowing users to remotely touch an object, feel texture, perhaps even control remote objects with thought, all within realistic immersive worlds. It feels like the stuff of science-fiction, but human-centric design, as applied to networks, will be about much more than just the movement of data, says Purva Rajkotia, director of global business strategic initiatives with the IEEE Standards Association.

“It will drive a revolution in the design of future networks, augmenting their importance as social infrastructure and playing a pivotal role in addressing social challenges in the areas of work, education, inclusion, and equality,” says Rajkotia. “A more human-centric approach will, for example, help us react better to emergencies such as pandemics, as well as enabling persistent personalised access to digital services and resources, both virtual and physical, without the constraints of time and location. It will also provide opportunities for entrepreneurs to design systems that improve the user experience, opening new areas of development and enabling new use cases.”

Setting a better standard

None of this, of course, will come to pass without agreed standards on how it can all work.

“Human-centric design means that from the very early stages of setting standards you need to build in design features and ergonomics that are close to users’ hearts,” says Adrian Scrase, an independent consultant with EA Consult Services. Scrase is also a visiting professor at the University of Surrey, a fellow of the Wireless World Research Forum, and former CTO of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).

It is not as easy as one might imagine, he warns, to come up with technology standards that are human-centred. “In my ETSI career we worked really hard at this, setting up a user group to address the issue,” he explains. “But it would be difficult to argue that these efforts had been entirely successful. It proved tricky to get coherent user input for a number of reasons. It can also be hard to get R&D people to buy into this domain, as it doesn’t attract funding.”

“When it comes to mobile broadband, people want their handsets to last a full day or more, a full week if possible”

Adrian Scrase, EA Consult Services

There are some things though, says Scrase, that we can all agree on. “We want reach, such that services are accessible regardless of our location,” he notes.  “And we all want reduced power consumption. When it comes to mobile broadband, people want their handsets to last a full day or more, a full week if possible. Standards can drive this.”

It falls to vendors and developers to design products, and operators to deploy services, that take into account user needs. Plenty can go wrong at this stage in ways that can alienate rather than involve humans. Just consider 5G, which after much hype ended up frustrating subscribers with a number of shortcomings, such as a tendency to drop back to 4G at the drop of a hat.

Testing is of course crucial here. One of the UK’s foremost future telecoms innovation sites is Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab, which is undergoing a strategic technology refresh from 5G to 6G. Its future network research focuses on a human-centric model, bridging the physical and the digital worlds through a digital representation of the physical world around us.

It’s an example of how innovative research can be conducted with usability always at the forefront, but this is also about tackling issues that have arisen through the development of 5G – learning lessons, as such. Nowhere is this more pertinent than in network energy consumption.

Improvements in 5G energy use are in the spotlight every 18 months with new 3GPP standards. Recent ones include the development of base stations that go into a deep sleep mode at night when traffic is low, and wake fast when they are needed. The higher and higher network speeds that users are demanding means we’re going to be using more energy by design, so we need to keep asking how we can get more for less.

Machines to the rescue?

Building AI into the next generation of connectivity standards might offer a number of dividends of a human-centric nature, believes Christian Gabetta, managing director of Heights Telecom, a developer of gateways and Wi-Fi extenders for deployment by communication service providers.

“In the homes and workplaces of the future we need to be designing features like prioritisation of traffic, more security, and sensing that reacts to where people are as they move around,” he says. “We can use AI that can detect if you might have had an accident, based on patterns of movement that it has been following, potentially automatically triggering an alarm. We’re doing a lot in areas like this. We also work a lot on energy management, because in many cases new human-centric technologies deployed in the home or workplace can end up consuming a lot of power, especially if they are operational 24/7.”

A more human-oriented approach to data security is also needed, he argues, one that goes beyond networks and laptops: “As a society we need to start thinking along human-centric lines about protecting a wider range of devices so that they aren’t Trojan horses allowing the hacker to get a foothold.”

Omdia’s Mendler agrees that we will need to see 6G working hand in hand with AI, not just to track and report at a human level but to predict, forewarn, and suggest.

“I anticipate time and motion observation allowing you to see where there is wastage within a process,” she says. “Could 6G, working with AI, suggest a less wasteful path for a vehicle or person to take, reducing energy consumption? Can more accurate data collection and analysis lead to greater human efficiencies? As urbanisation increases and more of us live in cities, it will be more important to measure the flow of how people move, how they consume energy, what the quality of the air they breathe is. We need technology that is both human-centred and which allows decisions in real time. This will be something that 6G will enable.”

This means, she believes, that the way we build and design networks has to change, since so much future activity will be going on at the edge of that network. This could result, for example, in the convergence of IT and telecoms into unified cloud networks, and the end of the era where these elements are designed around businesses not people. Omdia has been working in this field with vendor InterDigital and Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

Human-centred design will be an important antidote to the siloed thinking that we have seen throughout the enterprise technology sector. Ergonomic principles that have permeated the consumer device market have not generally been ported into the development of business solutions. A new generation of services and applications will need to do better, starting with basic observation of how we work and play. By putting human-focused design at the top of the agenda we can create more responsive businesses, ones that can respond in an agile fashion to market demands. That will depend on new thinking and new approaches at all levels.