I was on a panel tonight discussing Ethics in Design Research. I’m on a lot of panels about design and ethics because I’ve worked in AI design most of my career. Right before the panel, I read an article by a friend George Aye, who runs an amazing design firm…

I’ve been in design give or take on and off for more than 20 years. Design has always been my background to my storytelling foreground a way to willfully widen the narrative of the world to include people like me; those often on the periphery and in the margins. For…

When George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, the world changed — AGAIN. It shifted just like when Tayvon Martin was gunned down by a person who claimed to be protecting his community but was really a non-hero in the making. And then Eric Gardner whispered “I…

“I don’t use Facebook anymore,” she said. “They broke democracy.” I was leading a usability session for the design of a new mobile app when she stunned me with that statement. …

AI Pioneer Stuart Russell, in this seminal TED Talk, postulates a philosophical yet pragmatic framework for how to build intelligent systems to be better than us. Russell, who has literally written the book on AI design, advocates for building systems that are: Altruistic Humble and maximize human values The first…

Don Norman was right— human-centered design is harmful. Thirteen years ago the king of modern interaction design wrote a purely provocative piece calling into question the sacred tenet of the design empire he created. …

In 2014, MIT created the Moral Machine. It’s a webpage that showcases various ethical scenarios a self-driving car will never encounter. It asks people to decide what the car should do in each scenario. The scenarios involve moral choices such as deciding whether to hit one pedestrian and avoid hitting…

This post was originally published on LinkedIn on June 14, 2018. There’s a scene in Cixin Liu’s “The Dark Forest,” the second book of his “Three Body Problem,” trilogy I find particularly disturbing. It’s right after…wait. Before I go on, I’m going to give you folks who have yet to…

This post was published originally on LinkedIn on May 30, 2018 As a design research lead who works on any number of data-driven projects I’ve been thinking a lot about the ethical concerns surrounding “Big Data.” Though based in math and statistics, data-driven models are anything but impervious to the…