The ubiquity of our personal data, facial recognition, and AI are impacting our everyday lives in unprecedented ways. As designers, we consider how to transform the potential of these technologies into products and services or facilitate change on an organizational level.Recent national and international situations have highlighted the need for a more ethically minded thinking about the potential future implications of the technologies we help to deploy.
This class investigates designers’ responsibility not only to think about the potentials of these technologies, but also explore their potential social consequences. How might designers create new methods that accelerate our learning of the ethical implications of the technologies we work with?
Throughout the course, students are introduced to a variety of tools to explore some of these unintended consequences and social frictions of today’s emerging technologies to develop a clear point of view about the potentials — but also potential downsides — of specific technologies.Students use critical thinking to identify some of the potential issues but, more than than, use their design skills to devise new visual and experiential methods that engage others into discussing the open ethical questions of today’s emerging technologies.
