Design for Responsible AI

This talk by Vera Liao is part of the Design Interrupted talk series organized by the Department of Design, Aalto University

In her talk, Vera will reflect on paths forward for the design discipline to better address Responsible AI challenges, including opportunities for new design perspectives, toolboxes, and education.

Location: Lecture Hall A304, 3rd floor, Kemistintie 1, Espoo

About the talk:

AI is everywhere. This rapid adoption of AI technologies calls for responsible development to mitigate their potential harms to individuals, communities, and society. What roles can and should design play in Responsible AI (RAI)? What challenges do designers face working with AI as a design material and containing its risks? How should organizations that develop AI technologies leverage and prioritize design expertise? How should the design discipline evolve to meet the demands of RAI?

Motivated by these questions, this talk will share insights from six years of research studying and supporting UX design practices across multiple technology companies. Starting with introducing the overarching goals and principles of RAI, the talk will discuss designers’ critical roles throughout the AI development cycle, from illuminating the sociotechnical system, facilitating purposeful use of AI, to creating design interventions to mitigate harms. The talk will then reflect on paths forward for the design discipline to better address RAI challenges, including opportunities for new design perspectives, toolboxes, and education.

About the speaker:

Q. Vera Liao is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where she is part of the FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI) group, and an incoming Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Previously she worked as a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. With a research background in human-computer interaction and responsible AI, the overarching goal of her work is to bridge emerging AI technologies and human-centered perspectives. She has a long line of work engaging with and studying UX practitioners working in AI product teams, and developing new methods and tools to support such work. Her research has received many paper awards at HCI and AI venues. She currently serves as the co-editor-in-chief for the Springer HCI Book Series, and has served on the editorial or organizing teams for many conferences and journals including CHI, CSCW, FAccT, IUI, and ACM Tiis.

Host:

Memorable experiences make life meaningful. Design practices are advancing from problem-solving approaches to experience-driven ones, which requires a radical change in industry. Virpi’s mission is to help technology companies to transform themselves into experience providers. She studies experience design in business-to-business industry, and is interested in improving not only user experience but also customer experience, brand experience, and employee experience. Virpi develops techniques for experience design, co-design, and service design to improve experience design maturity in partner organizations. In addition to the impact in practice, she is one of the top cited academics in user experience research.

Panelists:

announced later

About the talk series:

www.aalto.fi/en/design-interrupted

Today, the study and practice of design are in great flux. We are amidst the biggest socio-economic transformation since the 1750s, experiencing the fifth Industrial Revolution. There is a growing pressure to transition economies driven by extractive, wasteful and polluting logics towards systems designed to fit the planetary limits. Such transformation requires the design of new types of products and services, as well as new systems and approaches to large-scale changes.

At the same time, design as a practice area is also changing. It is shifting away from a more rigidly defined practice of professionally trained designers creating graphics, objects and spaces towards a practice that is loosely defined, fuzzy and seemingly omnipresent. Many have been calling for democratizing design and recognizing the efforts of non-professional designers. Design thinking, methods and practices have entered many contexts, including governance, jurisprudence, sciences and activism. The design community has been grappling with the ever-expanding definitions of what design is and who a designer is.

This talk series invites design professionals, students, academics and anyone interested in these challenges to a series of conversations. Each event features a scene-setting lecture by a leading practitioner and thinker followed by open discussion. Three themes give focus to the series: digital, societal and material transformations. What is design’s role in these transformations? How do we generate new know-how to support the needed transitions, and what examples already exist that we can learn from? What stands in the way of progress towards equitable, diverse, and sustainable lives, and what is the role of design in removing such blockages? What are design and designers in this new context?

Department of Design at Aalto University invites you to join our conversations to explore what design is, can and should be in the 21st Century.

Host or Publisher Design Interrupted