Service Design Book Club with Stefanie Hutka
Stefanie Hutka is our guest speaker for the online book club event in December.
Book: What Your Machines Should Do
Guest Speaker and Author: Stefanie Hutka
Discussion: Overview + Chapter 6: Reinforcing Strategy Through Automation
Join us for an engaging conversation with Stef and fellow service design enthusiasts!
Book Summary
What Your Machines Should Do: The Science and Strategy of Human-Centered Automation is a field manual for steering automation to extend human capabilities and drive business results. It addresses the Automation Strategy Gap, where aspirations of fully automated futures become disconnected from organizational readiness and customer value.
The book frames AI as the latest chapter in a long history of automation, drawing on decades of durable lessons from human factors, HCI, cognitive science, systems thinking, and management theory to help you automate with intention. Readers gain frameworks and tools to set deliberate direction (where the organization is going and why), directed progression (how to sequence automation rollout to get there), and grounded tactics (day-to-day decisions about how to automate).
Testimonials
"Despite our general eagerness to increasingly automate our work and lives, the future of human potential requires us to do more of what humans can uniquely do. In an era of cognitive offloading, Hutka's timely book illustrates the costs, the opportunities, and the necessity of cognitive expansion."
— SCOTT BELSKY, Founder of Behance, author of The Messy Middle
"A delightful, surprisingly refreshing read on one of the hardest questions in tech... A must-read for product designers, PMs, business strategists, and frankly anyone trying to tame the AI beast."
— TATJANA DZAMBAZOVA, Head of AI at Motif; formerly Emerging Technology PM, Autodesk, IDEO alumni
“This book puts current discussions about AI into human, social, organizational, and historical context using rich and compelling examples that help readers understand how human choices about automation echo across technologies and sectors. Hutka makes crystal clear the case that AI strategy is human strategy first and foremost and provides concrete approaches for navigating strategic choices about automation.”
— ERIC T. MEYER, Dean & Chancellor's Professor of Social Informatics, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley
Event details
Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2026
Time: 11 am to 12 pm (EST) | 5 pm to 6 pm (CET) | Time Zone Converter
Location: Online event
Agenda
Introductions - 5 minutes
Overview of the chapter by Stef - 20 minutes (will be recorded)
Conversations with Stef - 30 minutes
Note: The Zoom link will be shared with registered participants.
About the guest speaker
Stef Hutka helps teams bring useful, usable AI, XR, and robotics products to market.
She is the founder of Sendfull, a boutique consultancy for emerging technology teams.
Previously, Stef led design research and strategy for 0-to-1 product launches at Adobe, Meta, and DAQRI.
Stef also teaches UX and systems thinking at UC Berkeley, and writes the leading Substack on emerging product design research (sendfull.substack.com).
She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Toronto, focused on cognitive neuroscience.
About Service Design Book Club
Please read about our first meet-up on Medium, visit our website, and follow our LinkedIn page or LinkedIn newsletter for information about the upcoming events.
If you have any questions before our meet-up, please feel free to send them to arun.martin@gmail.com.
Code of Conduct
Service Design Book Club is dedicated to providing a harassment-free event experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), or technology choices.
We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form.
We value your attendance!
(This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.)