Demystifying the black box: innovating Big Data through Service Design Activism [part 1]

Over the past six months, I have been working actively across tech, design and social innovation sectors to explore the role of design and designers in uncovering the ‘black boxed’ culture of data-enabled service productions. Here, I lay out the challenges we are seeing in today’s tech landscape — its failure for transparency, inclusion and fairness — and propose ‘Service Design Activism’ as a way to democratise digital service innovation practice.

This is part one of the series ‘Demystifying the black box: innovating Big Data through Service Design Activism.’ Stay tuned for part two!

Where ‘data’ exists in our everyday life (see bottom for image sources)

Data in everyday life

We have all witnessed the power of data: Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data breach, Russian interference of Trump campaign and China’s social credit system are just a few of the many tech scandals that have left a profound impact on people’s lives. It is almost difficult to predict what the next big scandal is — yet here we are…