Just Design

Software	None
Covers	Ethics, psychology, social impact of technology
Skills Required	Interest in ethics and moral philosophy, interest in social impact of computers
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ?? Programming

Brief Description

How can a software system, an AI application, or some other kind of interactive system be just? Does it matter whether an inanimate interactive system deals fairly with different kinds of users or other stakeholders? If so, where does moral or practical responsibility for this lie? (The answer YES to this question is built into UK law by the Equality Act 2010 and by its predecessor the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.) But what are appropriate notions of justice or fairness to use, and does that question have different answers for different kinds of systems? How can a concern for justice be embedded in a development process? Is it possible to operationalize notions of justice and measure performance, so that justice becomes a target or system requirement, rather than just an aspiration, or a notion to pay lip service to and then forget? How can justice be balanced against other desirable characteristics that we want our interactive systems to have? Might it be the case that the price of justice is too high for it to be just to pay it, or too high to make it practical to pay it in a real life situation, and if so, when?

The aim of this project is to elaborate some of these questions and provide some sophisticated answers. This is going to require digging into both moral philosophy and the technical and practical issues involved in designing, building and using particular kinds of interactive systems.

Variants

This is not an entirely new issue, and has been considered extensively for commercial and organizational websites. And there are theoretical discussions to draw on. This is going to be most interesting if you consider a particular class of interactive systems that may present distinctive challenges, and dig into the issues of what can and can't be done, or should or shouldn't be done, for that class of systems.

Resource

This project proposal was inspired by this paper, which provides a starting point:

Matteo Bianchin & Ann Heylighen (2018) Just design. Design Studies, 54, 1-22.

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