We are used to hearing about new technologies and technological breakthroughs that are supposed to change the world as we know it.
All this language makes us lose sight of what new technologies really are and the work that is really done to impact our lives.

New technologies mean technical advances generally linked to digital technology. The invention of the cell phone and then the smartphone were technological leaps for society, but the new technologies developed were those of telecommunications and touch screens. Phones and smartphones are technological innovations that bring together a set of technologies.

New technologies are designed by engineers who seek to push the limits of what we can do from a technical point of view. There is no purpose to new technologies, they are designed for the beauty of science.

Touch screens were developed and improved long before the arrival of the iPhone. No one had in mind that these screens would be used 20 years later to scroll a news feed on Twitter.

A telling example is the USB flash drive whose storage has grown in 20 years from a few megabytes to several gigabytes and now terabytes. There is no interest in itself to have so much storage space available, engineers are only concerned with technical progress. What is done with the developed technologies is not the domain of engineering.

Empirically it is the entrepreneurs who propose applications to new technologies, but the science that studies the applications of new technologies to make them usable innovations is ergonomics.

Ergonomics studies technologies from the human point of view. The studies conducted focus on the psychological, behavioral and emotional relationship of the population to innovations and new technologies.

The objective is to anticipate the impacts that emerging technologies will have on humans and to know how to optimize these technologies for valued uses.
Engineering creates new technologies, ergonomics designs new uses.

By studying humans, ergonomics can define a set of rules to design the interface that will allow humans to interact with the machines embedding the new technologies.

For that, the study of the needs and the technological acceptability is essential. A set of criteria will be defined and will guide the engineers in their work by taking into account the humans.
Ergonomic studies are also used to define the uses of new technologies. Each concrete application of a technology to a domain will be accompanied by usability criteria to be respected and user behaviors to be defined.

Ergonomics must take hold of developing technologies very early on in order to find concrete applications and define the usability and acceptability criteria to be respected. New technologies are useless on their own, we must find applications that will really impact users.

Once the applications are found and the design criteria defined, it is the role of the designers to intervene. By taking into account what users want to achieve by using a new technology to accomplish a goal, designers will design optimal user experiences

New technology as we understand it is a combination of a technical evolution, an application for humans, and a user experience.

Marketing usually focuses on technical advances that become marketing arguments even though there is no noticeable difference for the user. And applications of technologies are often imagined by entrepreneurs who innovate by incrementation rather than rethinking the relationship of the technology to an existing domain.

New technologies are well on their way to revolutionize our societies, but it is the applications that we will find for them that will impact our lives. Ergonomists and designers have a key role to play in the design of new technologies, by shaping their applications they will shape the society of tomorrow.