Who builds artificial intelligence? Is it engineers and computer scientists, or writers, filmmakers, and artists? Researchers who investigate the narratives of AI show that storytellers have as much influence on technology as tech-makers do, and that stories have been shaping the future for centuries. In the newly released AI Narratives…

There’s an urgent cry for actionable design methods to tackle concerns over more responsible tech. So we’re building a library of them. Terrors over the (un)ethical impact of many of the technologies we keep churning out make headlines daily. If, like me, you’re among the growing percentage of designers and…

Meet the new design process: An upgrade with ethics & digital wellbeing baked in. In the frenzied quest to keep a moral handle on AI, dozens of groups have organized the collaborative creation of ethical principles. From the Asilomar AI Principles to the IEEEs Ethically-aligned design specification, to the individual…

Meet the six levels at which tech influences our behaviour, motivation and happiness. Would you say email improves your life or makes it worse? The simple question of whether a technology is good or bad for us is nuanced and hard to pin down. To help untie some of the…

As tech makers, we all want to boost motivation, engagement and even foster #DigitalWellbeing. These are design holy grails, but grails are wicked and crafty beasts — black box concepts that are hard to pin down and design for. That is, until you understand the three things that feed them. …

Our belief in equality has lead to technical infrastructures that equalize the wrong things. Now that voices are being fabricated and trivialities are dominating attention, if our technology doesn’t allow for greater discrimination, we risk nothing less than tyranny. by: Rafael A. Calvo & Dorian Peters There’s a battle raging…

What if we taxed it? — By Rafael Calvo and Dorian Peters I start by discussing dinner but end up detailing an alien invasion by four-eyed chickens in bikinis just to see if my son will notice. We’ve all been there—madly wrestling for the attention of a loved one who’s buried deep in a digital device…

My coffee is warm and fragrant today and my laptop fully charged. All is in place for a productive morning, yet there is a problem: my mind wants to wander into other things. For me it’s the news that tempts me, and today it could be big. Due to a…

For me as a designer, philosophy is a kind of disruptive design provocation. It’s disruptive because it attacks the foundations of our belief systems — exposes the values we never knew were driving us — it breaks the box. When Foucault exposes the microphysics of power, he lifts the curtain…