Designing Technology and Policy Simultaneously: Towards A Research Agenda and New Practice
Together with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Stanford University and Georgia Institute of Technology, the VA-PEPR team was involved in running a workshop to explore the following question ‘How can technology design and policies better inform and coordinate with each other in generating safe new technologies?’ at CHI23 conference in Hamburg.
Accounting for technologies’ unintended consequences—whether they are misinformation on social media or issues of sustainability and social justice—increasingly requires Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to consider technology design at a societal-level scale. At this scale, public and corporate policies play a critical role in shaping technologies and user behaviors.
However, the research and practices around tech and policy design have largely been held separate. The workshop attracted practitioners and scholars from different backgrounds (from technology to policy and design) and aimed to do the following :
- Identify disciplines and areas of expertise needed for a tighter, more proactive technology-and-policy-design integration,
- Launch a community of researchers, educators, and designers interested in this integration,
- Identify and publish an HCI research and education agenda towards designing technologies and technology policies simultaneously.
Prof. Dr. Sabine Junginger was among the promoters and organisers of the workshop. On behalf of the VA-PEPR team, Dr. Paola Pierri presented the paper Everyday Data and Everyday Publics which introduces VA-PEPR research and explores the role of the Everyday in technology and policy development.
For more info, download the workshop description here and check out the workshop website.