Theories of Socio-digital Design for Human Centred AI

Preliminary reading

Students are encouraged to read Alan Blackwell’s Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI forthcoming in 2024 with MIT Press (available as an advance public release copy here) as a preliminary reading to the course.

Reading list - Part 1

Seminar 1: Responsible AI and HCI: Insights from Human-Computer Interaction and Critical Design for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence

Essential reading:

• Philip E. Agre, Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI.
• What is “Critical” about Critical Design? by Jeffrey Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3297–3306. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466451
• Wei Xu and Marvin Dainoff. 2023. Enabling Human-Centered AI: A New Junction and Shared Journey Between AI and HCI Communities. interactions 30, 1 (January - February 2023), 42–47. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571883

Further reading:

• Qian Yang, Aaron Steinfeld, Carolyn Rosé, and John Zimmerman. 2020. Re-examining Whether, Why, and How Human-AI Interaction Is Uniquely Difficult to Design. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376301
• Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. The MIT Press, 2013. Project MUSE http://muse.jhu.edu/book/28148

Seminar 2: Intersectional Design: Reorienting AI Development Towards Social Justice

Miro Board

Essential reading:

• Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination. Journal of Design and Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.21428/96c8d426

Essential practical/technical resources:

• Jones, Schiebinger, Grimes, Small, Intersection Design Cards: A Design Activity to Create Radically Inclusive Products, Processes, and Paradigms, https://intersectionaldesign.com
• Joana Varon and Clarote, The Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies - website and card deck: https://www.transfeministech.codingrights.org

Further reading:

• Sasha Costanza-Chock. 2020. Design Justice. MIT Press. https://designjustice.mitpress.mit.edu
• Shaowen Bardzell. 2010. Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1301–1310. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753521
• Goda Klumbytė, Claude Draude and Alex S. Taylor. 2022. Critical Tools for Machine Learning: Working with Intersectional Critical Concepts in Machine Learning Systems Design. In 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '22), June 21-24, 2022, Seoul, Republic of Korea. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 21 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533207

Seminar 3: Participatory design and co-design: On Power-sensitive Inclusion and Collaboration in AI Development

Essential reading:

• Fernando Delgado, Stephen Yang, Michael Madaio, Qian Yang, The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.00907
• [SHORT READ] Mona Sloane, Emanuel Moss, Olaitan Awomolo, and Laura Forlano. 2022. Participation Is not a Design Fix for Machine Learning. In Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 1, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3551624.3555285
• [SHORT READ] Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input, Anthropic blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/index/collective-constitutional-ai-aligning-a-language-model-with-public-input

Further reading:

• King, Paula & Cormack, Donna. (2023). Indigenous Peoples, Whiteness, and the Coloniality of Co-design, https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-981-19-1612-0_28-1
• Blakeley H. Payne, Jordan Taylor, Katta Spiel, and Casey Fiesler. 2023. How to Ethically Engage Fat People in HCI Research. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 117–121. https://doi.org/10.1145/3584931.3606987

Seminar 4: More-than-human Design: Considering the Environment and Non-human Animals as Stakeholders in Design

Essential reading:

• Laura Forlano, Post-humanism and design, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation (Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001

Essential practical/technical resources:

• Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit: https://inclusive.microsoft.design/#InclusiveDesignToolsActivities)
• The Interspecies Design Toolkit, https://www.interspeciesdesign.co.uk/interspecies-toolkit/

Further reading:

• Betti Marenko & Philip van Allen (2016) Animistic design: how to reimagine digital interaction between the human and the nonhuman, Digital Creativity, 27:1, 52-70, https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2016.1145127
• Paul Coulton & Joseph Galen Lindley (2019) More-Than Human Centred Design: Considering Other Things, The Design Journal, 22:4, 463-481, https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2019.1614320

---

Reading list - Part 2

Seminar 5: AI Ethics Practical Resources: Questioning the Usefulness and Usability of Ethical Design Toolkits.

Essential reading:

• Michael A. Madaio, Luke Stark, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, and Hanna Wallach. 2020. Co-Designing Checklists to Understand Organizational Challenges and Opportunities around Fairness in AI. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376445
• Richmond Y. Wong, Michael A. Madaio, and Nick Merrill. 2023. Seeing Like a Toolkit: How Toolkits Envision the Work of AI Ethics. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW1, Article 145 (April 2023), https://doi.org/10.1145/3579621

Essential practical/technical resources:

• Catalogue of Tools & Metrics for Trustworthy AI, OECD AI Policy Observatory, https://oecd.ai/en/catalogue/overview

Further reading:

• Greene, Daniel & Hoffmann, Anna & Stark, Luke. (2019). Better, Nicer, Clearer, Fairer: A Critical Assessment of the Movement for Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/849782a6-06bf-4ce8-9144-a93de4455d1c/content
• Os Keyes, Jevan Hutson, and Meredith Durbin. 2019. A Mulching Proposal: Analysing and Improving an Algorithmic System for Turning the Elderly into High-Nutrient Slurry. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper alt06, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3310433

Seminar 6: The EU AI Act in Design Practice: On Meaningfully Implementing New Regulatory Requirements in AI Development

Essential reading:

• [SHORT READ] Regulatory framework proposal on artificial intelligence, EU Commission Blog Post, https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai
• Floridi, Luciano and Holweg, Matthias and Taddeo, Mariarosaria and Amaya Silva, Javier and Mökander, Jakob and Wen, Yuni, capAI - A Procedure for Conducting Conformity Assessment of AI Systems in Line with the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (March 23, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4064091 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4064091

Essential practical/technical resources:

• The In-Depth EU AI Toolkit: http://lcfi.ac.uk/projects/ai-innovation-praxis/eu-ai-act-toolkit/

Seminar 7: AI and Interface Design: On AI Transparency in Recommender Systems

Essential reading:

• Nick Seaver, Care and Scale: Decorrelative Ethics in Algorithmic Recommendation. Cultural Anthropology 36 (3): 509–537. https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/4807/661
• Tobias Schnabel, Saleema Amershi, Paul N. Bennett, Peter Bailey, and Thorsten Joachims. 2020. The Impact of More Transparent Interfaces on Behavior in Personalized Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 991–1000. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397271.3401117

Further reading:

• 002_Aesthetics of New AI Interfaces: a reader (Creative AI Lab and Serpentine Galleries: https://d37zoqglehb9o7.cloudfront.net/uploads/2021/02/002_Aesthetics-of-New-AI-Interfaces.pdf
• Arianna Rossi and Monica Palmirani. 2020. Can Visual Design Provide Legal Transparency? The Challenges for Successful Implementation of Icons for Data Protection, Design Issues 36 (3), https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00605

Seminar 8: Designing otherwise: On Anarchist HCI

Essential reading:

• Os Keyes, Josephine Hoy, and Margaret Drouhard. 2019. Human-Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 339, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300569
• Advait Sarkar. 2023. Should Computers Be Easy To Use? Questioning the Doctrine of Simplicity in User Interface Design, CHI EA ’23, April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany, https://advait.org/files/sarkar_2023_simplicity.pdf