Dear Gunnar,
Thanks for posting the link to the interview about A.I. and its impacts on equality. The broad notion that design can make a difference to peoples attitudes and social conditions of course has a long history. In the Western tradition, the standpoint that design should improve the lives of working class people is commonly connected to the Early Modern Movement of the mid nineteenth century. Artists-designer-critics such as John Ruskin and William Morris believed that good design should not just be available to the elites but affordable for all. And the intended and unintended social effects of the Modern Movement are well known.
The specific question about how designs create unintended negative social conditions is an important subject of research. One growing research programme that does research on design and equality can be found with the discipline of Public Policy. Research within Public Policy has predominately concentrated on decision making and analysis of governmental action, however, some researchers within the research programme of Policy Design take the standpoint that evaluating the merits of a policy is not possible by just examining the process of policy making, rather attention must also be given to the design (noun) of the policy itself. These researchers have argued that policies usually reproduce the prevailing institutional culture, power relationships, and stereotypes of target populations and knowledge (Schneider & Ingram, 1997, p. 5-6). They argue that policy makers typically socially construct target populations in positive and negative terms and distribute benefits and burdens so as to perpetuate these constructions. Put simply, social constructions often beat rational policy-making such that good things go to “good” people and punishments go to those perceived as “bad”. Inequality is the result of long-term policy failures due to the feed-forward effects of the reproduction of labels, stereotypes and stigma that discourage active citizenship and send messages about which sorts of people count as important, who is likely to be taken seriously, and who will probably be ignored, isolated or marginalized.
Lucy Suchman makes a very similar argument about the role of social constructions and impact of A.I. in the interview at 08:00-10:00. She argues that the algorithms reproduce stereotypes and assumptions (parameters) that are introduced by the system designers. Unfortunately she doesn’t give a clear answer how to address the problem. However, Schneider and Ingram (1997, pp. 203-207) do suggest seven heuristics for evaluating policy designs for their consequences for democratic values such as equality and justice:
1. Construct target groups for benefits and burdens that cut across lines of long-standing social, racial, economic, or other lines
2. Design to ensure public involvement and avoid overly complex and technical designs that empower narrow scientific and professional interests
3. Create designs to encourage and strengthen communicative ethics and communicative rationality across all policy-making contexts in government, the work-place, and civil society
4. Cultivate a sense of community through designs that favour the creation of civic organizations
5. Design for context, draw from multiple theories, and analyse from multiple perspectives
6. Design policies that build capacity, inform, empower, and facilitate self-governance and learning rather than policies that manipulate through slogans or symbols
7. Avoid designs that rely on deception for support
These heuristics may offer some directions forward. There are also connections here to the principles of empathic design, participatory design and co-design.
Research on Social Construction and Policy Design has been ongoing since about 1990, for reviews of the literature see Ingram et. al. (2007) and Pierce et, al. (2014)
Best,
Luke
Luke Feast, PhD | Postdoctoral Researcher in Design | Department of Design | School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Aalto University | Finland
Ingram, H., Schneider, A., L., & deLeon, P. (2007). Social Construction and Policy Design. In P. A. Sabatier (Ed.), Theories of the Policy Process (pp. 169-189). CO: Westview Press.
Pierce, J. J., Siddiki, S., Jones, M. D., Schumacher, K., Pattison, A., & Peterson, H. (2014). Social Construction and Policy Design: A Review of Past Applications. Policy Studies Journal, 42(1), 1-29. doi:10.1111/psj.12040
Schneider, A., L., & Ingram, H. (1997). Policy Design for Democracy: University Press of Kansas.
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