parjai project funded
My project proposal Participatory Design Justice for Ethical AI Transitions (PARJAI) has been awarded 1.3 M euros by the Ministero Istruzione, Universita' e Ricerca under the FIS2 program. This will allow me to hire 6 PhD students in the space of design research, HCI, social justice, participatory AI, and explainability.
PARJAI aims to uncover the key factors contributing to participatory design issues of social justice when applied to artificial intelligence (AI) transitions.
AI transitions are the processes by which AI systems are implemented, in between the algorithms’ development and their real-world deployment. As these come with abundant risks and unintended discriminatory consequences, there is dramatic demand for responsible and inclusive practices, among which PD is devised as a strategic way to ensure that human values and rights are respected when implementing AI systems.
However, participatory design has its own justice issues as it fails to address its inherent perpetuation of historically imbalanced power dynamics and leaves unattended the radical issues that hinder inclusion of marginalized groups in design processes.
When engaged in the context of AI transitions, PD sets out to unprecedently exacerbate these issues by means of exclusion, i.e., increasing the divide between the ones who participate and benefit from AI implementation, and the ones who are excluded and bear the costs, and by opacity, i.e., maintaining a disproportional distribution of knowledge as AI systems are complex and opaque making unprecedently difficult for non-experts to express informed opinions.
PARJAI will investigate these issues of power by combining expert interviews with participatory action research, inclusive of case studies operating at different scales of participation. Leveraging theories from intersectional feminism on the one hand, and explainable AI on the other, the project will introduce novel PD methodologies, i.e., intersectional AI charrettes and AI boundary objects with the ultimate goal of shedding light on the factors, conditions, types of knowledge and processes that contribute to power issues.
