On May 6, 2024, Dr. Joyce Lee from NCCU discussed emerging topics related to smart technology in a lecture titled “What Lies Beneath: Unraveling the Generative Mechanisms to Build a Smart Technology” in Dr. Chen’s MIS (management information systems) class. While her topic of generative mechanism and smart technology related well with the current generative AI trends, she revealed that when they developed this research idea generative AI was not even popular like nowadays.

She first showed that we have been witnessing a variety of emerging applications related to smart technology such as amazonGo, self-driving vehicles, apple watch, Nike plus, and smart home. Although these applications and devices sound trendy, it might not be well adapted by users. Such problems motivated her research topic, which revolved around understanding the process through creating and maintaining an acceptable working systems of emerging smart technology.

Since her research was about “smartness” of a product or service, she explained that smart technology included physical components like mechanical parts and device, smart components such as sensors and software, and connectivity components including protocols and networks linking the product to database. To identify or justify smart products, they would need to be, not just innovative, but also integrated to users’ needs. More specifically, smart technologies would need to be innovative in enabling machine-to-human interaction as well as human-to-human interaction.

Dr. Joyce then illustrated how the case company underwent iterative processes, from product design, software application, prototyping, to beta testing, until they finally came up with a final design that was commercialized. Through such complex processes, three generative mechanisms for designing smart technology and services were conceptualized: human-system fitness mechanism, data exploitation mechanism, and user expansion mechanism. The fact that her paper was published in one of the best journals in the IS field, Journal of Association for Information Systems, suggested that these generative mechanisms provided new insights that were worth smart technology users’ and developers’ attention.