RESPONSIBLE DESIGN FOR (NOT WITH) HARD-TO-REACH USERS

Urgent new priorities, ranging from social inequalities to the climate emergency, are creating new roles for design professionals. Design education responds, fostering responsible design through collaborations with new kinds of stakeholders, technologies and expert advisers. This is an example of such a multidisciplinary, design-led, innovation project, with some student output and learning outcomes, reflections and subsequent developments. In a Masters course that emphasises personal purpose for change-making in the world, and alongside other units focusing on designing with ethical, environment and social responsibility, this 3 week unit tasked MA/MSc students of Innovation Design with applying artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to human rights and humanitarian issues. The project brings expert insights, inspiration and guidance from fields of AI and ML, but also international criminal law & war crimes, collective intelligence, gamification, gender-based violence and people trafficking. The process and outcomes are shared as examples of rapid learning from an intensive activity, with little technical instruction and no primary user research. Here the designer acts for users and stakeholders outside of the consumer-corporate dynamic. The beneficiaries may be victims of human rights abuses and cannot ethically be included directly in research or testing by students. Despite this, the project demonstrates the value of secondary research and empathic methods alone. In an open-ended qualitative survey, responding students expressed appreciation for the opportunity to explore such challenges, and for a sense of purpose, reward or validation in their efforts to create futures that are inclusive and just.