Grant: Discovery Horizons

Digital technologies are intimately linked to social transformation. What is needed to make this change as constructive as possible? Digital tools and software systems at their heart are driven by market forces, perceived needs and problems to be solved. Design and development processes include user needs and behaviour but do not include other social factors explicitly. Yet such tools affect many social factors (health, education, agency, worldviews, values). There is no doubt that digital tools hold immense promise for improving social life. Yet externalizing these social factors from design processes might be an obstacle to realizing the full potential of digital tools, and has already had unintended consequences, especially on younger users. For example, the values of software developers and their society shape their approach, but neither these values nor those of the users are explicit in current processes. Current design processes externalize the sense of purpose, capacities, values, worldviews and moral frameworks of designers and impact the same in users. Algorithm bias has been shown to include racist and colonial values. Suggestion algorithms for streaming media have contributed to extreme behaviour. Design principles used for social media and other apps intended originally for entertainment use by adults in Western countries have had negative impacts on young people and those from other societies. We propose investigating how design processes could be driven more by releasing and realizing individual and collective human potential and purpose, rather than purely a problem-solving approach. The aim would be to internalize agency, health, education, digital literacy, values and worldviews. The objectives are to: 1) identify the impact of software systems on social factors; 2) determine changes to design processes to incorporate the findings and mitigate unintended consequences; and 3) examine digital policies and regulation needed to support companies to adopt such design processes. Lines of inquiry related to agency, digital literacy, health, values and policies would be carried out to meet these objectives. For the first 4 lines of inquiry, the goal is to better understand the impact of design on each and modify design processes to internalize them. For the final one, the goal is to identify policies needed to support companies to adopt the proposed changes to design processes.