Organised by University of The Arts London (UAL)
Prof. Alexander Boden and Veronika Krauß, University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, explore challenges imposed by emerging technology.
Emerging digital technologies such as XR and AI bear many unknowns regarding their opportunities and their impact on society and the individual. Not only are they challenging to design due to a lack of good practices and established tools and methods, they also impose difficult to anticipate short-term and long-term effects on consumers.
As the existence of dark patterns – deceptive designs that are systematically applied to steer and manipulate users to perform unwanted actions – and the resulting challenges imposed on legislation demonstrate, it is important to find novel approaches to research, understand, regulate, and mitigate possible effects of such technologies in design time, before technologies become established. This calls for novel methods and design practices for technology creation and impact assessment. This guest lecture provides insights into challenges imposed by emerging technology that operates on data collection and interpretation through the lens of consumer protection.
Speaker Biography
Prof. Alexander Boden is director of the Institute for Consumer Informatics at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Science. He studied cultural anthropology/ethnology at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. After graduating in 2005, he completed his doctorate in business information systems at the University of Siegen in 2011, and received his habilitation in 2019. His dissertation was awarded the study prize of the Siegen-Wittgenstein district in 2012. Research visits led him to the Universities of Victoria/Canada, Lancaster/UK, and to Tomsk/Siberia. Since 2013, Alexander Boden has been a project manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) in the field of user centered design. His research interests are digital consumption and consumer protection, as well as sustainable and ethical innovation.
Veronika Krauß is a research fellow and lecturer at the Institute for Consumer Informatics at University of Siegen and the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. Her work focuses on interaction design and design practices beyond the desktop – specifically augmented and virtual reality. She graduated from Bauhaus-University Weimar in 2016 and has worked at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) as a user-centered designer. Her ongoing PhD investigates XR interaction design and prototyping practices in industry. Further, as a visiting researcher at the University of Michigan – School of Information, she researched technology acceptance and (un-)ethical design for XR with a focus on dark patterns. Her work was published at top-tier conferences for HCI and augmented/virtual reality.
About AI Ethics through Design
AI Ethics through Design is a companion program to the AI Ethics through Design Collab Brief that is hosted by the Design School of LCC:UAL in collaboration with IsITethical? Exchange.
The programme invites industry partners and academic guests developing work that interrogates and explores the role of design and the arts in supporting AI responsible innovation, by reformulating ethics away from the tick box exercise and into collaborative, creative, contextual process that informs better social and environmental futures.
Attending the programme is not a requisite for submission but will help you to frame your project.
Free and open to all