Design is a social and cultural practice (as well as a technical one). Developing ethical systems requires more than creating technical ethical design tools for individual designers; it also requires consideration of social and cultural infrastructures that can help support designers when making decisions with ethical impacts. These infrastructures may include new organizational practices, law and policy, supporting worker and community-led actions, or developing tools that consider the social and organizational contexts where technologies are developed.
In this talk I will present on projects that investigate two possible areas to develop ethics infrastructures: how “AI ethics” toolkits imagine the work of doing ethics with artificial intelligence systems; and how organizations have rhetorically represented data privacy laws as forms of business risks. Through these examples I will discuss what HCI and design can learn from looking at these practices, and suggest new opportunities for design.
In-person food will be available at 11:45 PM, Zoom will open at 12:00 PM, the talk will start at 12:15 PM.
Richmond Wong is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication. His research seeks to create social, cultural, and organizational environments that can support technologists and designers in ethical decision-making. Richmond’s work utilizes qualitative and design-based methods, drawing from critically-oriented human computer interaction, science & technology studies, and speculative and critical design. He completed his PhD at the University of California Berkeley School of Information, and he has undergraduate degrees in Information Science and Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University.