Assignment 11

Designing for the Unintended:

I enjoyed listening to Jess Majekodunmi sharing her experiences in regards to her career development as well as her encounters with different surprises as she explored more positions in the industry, slowly aligning her values with the work that she does. Through these experiences, she was able to practice conscious innovation which is a system of thinking that explores the impacts of ideas (and most likely technologies) that one is working with. She shares several free resources online and provided by the government that allow teams to test the ethics of their work. Majekodunmi also highlights the importance of designing for unintended users and learning how a certain product/technology can be used by different people. She shares how the initial intention of the wheel was for it to be used for pottery and not for transportation and I thought that was very interesting. But it’s also crucial to look into “what bad can be done with what [was] created.” She goes on to explain that one way of doing that is by assigning bad actors and testing how they would use the product.

Additionally, I thought her insight in regards to history and robots was very interesting. I definitely agreed with her when she said that technology has conceptually existed for a long time in media and stories way before it physically existed. This can be used in our advantage when designing for the future because we can reference these media pieces as inspiration for the future.