WebSummit: AI and Ethical Design

XF Founder Howard Pyle and Board Member Amit Sen recently took the stage at WebSummit to discuss the intersection of digital equity, front-end experience design, and the impact of machine learning and AI tools. Drawing from their diverse backgrounds in design, coding, and human rights law, Pyle and Sen explored the challenges and opportunities in creating inclusive digital experiences for refugees and other underserved communities.

Full Transcript

Howard Pyle 0:03

All right. Hi, everyone. Thanks for being here. Today is a great session. I'm Howard Pyle, this is Amit Sen, we're going to talk a little bit about what we see coming in terms of the intersection of digital equity, front end experience design on how machine learning and AI tools are going to impact that. Just by way of background, I spent 20 years as a digital product designer and startups - I ran a network of design studios at IBM. Most recently, I ran design UX, front end platforms for MetLife and I resigned to start this organization, xfutures.org. And we're focused on how to shift digital front end experiences to be more equitable through new design methods and through new technologies, and Amit, you want to introduce yourself?

Amit Sen 0:57

Sure, yeah. So I'm Amit Sen. And I work in a very different field, probably with some different experiences coming into it. I'm a human rights lawyer. I currently work at the UN Refugee Agency. But I'm not speaking on behalf of the UN today, because what I want to say, in a way is much more personal. It's much closer to home. And it comes a little bit from my family's own story. So I'm from India, but I'm also from Bangladesh. And as many people will know, when India became independent, something like 12 million people were displaced from their homes, and what was their country and that included my family. And then in 1971, when Bangladesh went through the same process, and it became independent, another 6 million were displaced. And again, that included my family. And then when my parents got married, instead of having arranged and in fact, forced marriages, they eloped and ran away and fell in love. They too needed to flee for their own safety. So for me working on refugee issues has never been about fixing something out there. It's been the story of my own family, my own community and my own life, so it’s deeply personal. I've worked in it in a couple different capacities. And what I'm really inspired by now is how refugees are engaging with digital environments, and digital platforms to solve, in a way the same sets of problems that my family was looking at for the last four to five decades, but in new ways, with new opportunities, and also some new risks. And I'm really excited about the entry point that experience futures has opened up to take a closer look at that.

Howard Pyle 2:25

Yeah. So the thing I think we want to touch on today's is talking about, “How do you think about the future of experience?” And when we think about the term experience in a digital or creative capacity, we're really talking about front end design. We're talking about the content, the UX, the visual design, but also the front end coding that makes up the websites, the mobile apps that you use. And when you talk to academics, about the digital divide, which is a term that's been around for quite some time, a lot of what we end up talking about is the, you know, bandwidth. Do you have a computer physical infrastructure, but the academics talk about a second and a third layer of the digital divide, which is really about access. Do you understand the designs that have been given to you? Do you understand the content? Do you have the cognitive abilities to understand what's being presented to you? And the insight that we started this organization around is basically that all websites, all mobile apps; all front end design you interact with is fundamentally designed for digitally privileged users - people already know how to use those tools. And if you look at a lot of the tools that we create, especially in a COVID era, where everything's going into digital spaces, people are being left behind. So if I'm an older person, and I don't understand how digital tools work, but yet mobile healthcare is accelerating, I don't just have a digital problem, I actually lose access to healthcare. And this plays out in an ageing population. It plays out in terms of racial justice, gender, gender, ethics, etc. And a lot of the things that we're working on together, and part of what Amit and I are here to talk about is, how does that impact refugees and stateless individuals. So there has to be a fundamental change in the way that front end experience is created. We have to have new methods, we have to think about the audiences, we have to link those methods to our diversity and impact and inclusion goals, to our purposes, to our social statements and our social sentiments within every organization. And what I've witnessed as a professional and I'm therefore a contributor to this problem, is that every design I've participated in, has never really linked to the diverse audiences that the organization claims to support. And so that's why we started this organization as an effort to try to change that, and some of that it's about method and process of design., and some of that is about the tools, the wave of machine learning and AI tools that are going to hit the front-end experiences. And Amit and I have actually known each other for quite a long time - we actually used to live in a punk rock group house together in Washington, DC. Amit was a bike messenger and I played in a punk band. And so now here we are all fancy on stage for you. But, the thing that's we've talked about for years and years and years is how do our different disciplines you know, I'm a lawyer, I'm a designer and a coder. How do these things overlap? And so I think that the thing that's been very interesting in our conversations on it is you've talked a lot about how does the front end experience hit the world of refugees, stateless individuals in your work in terms of human rights advocacy?