Design Tech & Policy
Simultaneously

From social media’s effects on civic discourse to automation-driven worker displacement, AI applications can negatively impact society. These harms often arise not from flawed algorithms alone but from complex interactions among technology, user behavior, economic incentives, and corporate and government policies. However, current AI product‑innovation processes rarely treat a product’s economic model or policy implications as standard design considerations. As a result—seen in examples from Uber’s early circumvention of taxi regulations to genAI models’ unresolved copyright issues—AI product and service innovations often broke or skirted existing laws first, and continue to struggle with societal impacts years or decades later.

This project explores a future where designers design AI products/services, their business models, and policies simultaneously, in order to achieve AI for social good. We advocate that designers (1) review relevant existing policies as thoroughly as they review existing technologies, (2) map and design value flows among stakeholders, explicitly accounting for the economic value of data and risks such as worker displacement, and (3) prototype new AI systems and their policy guardrails in tandem.

The following publications are our manifestos. You can find how we apply this new approach to designing LLM-based mental well-being tools here.

• Designing Technology and Policy Simultaneously: Towards A Research Agenda and New Practice (CHI’23)
• The Future of HCI-Policy Collaboration (CHI’24)

This project is a collaboration between our team (Qian Yang, Ned Cooper), Beth Kolko, Richmond Wong, Steve Jackson, and John Zimmerman, among others.