School of Communication and Culture

How can design, as an interdisciplinary field of research and practice, anticipate the digital transformation of society powered by data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence? How can we form an understanding of the different agencies involved—human and artifi- cial—and create the conditions for sustainable human-machine relations and co-perfor- mances?

Inclusive and responsible digital futures call for fundamentally new design ideals and professional practices. This requires combining advances in engineering, the social sciences, and the humanities to provide the necessary connection in design between human experience (one-to-one relations) and the societal system (end-to-end relations). The crafting of agency must be positioned as foundational to design today just like function was critical to industrial design.

The papers in this track offer radical lenses to change the narrative and futures of AI that are so often owned by the tech community, signaling directions and redirections for experiment- ing with novel practices that contribute to the call to design set forth by this track. The first two papers offer questions that help us set out the call and expand our critical and cultural lens towards AI and data science. The papers that follow engage in ethical, imaginative, and socio-economic redirections that suggest pathways for future design practices that aim to uphold anticipatory and responsible approaches.