Responsible Innovation: The Next Wave of Design Thinking
By: Mira Lane
Tags: User Experience, Microsoft, UX Design, Design, UX

Every profession experiences waves of evolution. Moments in time where processes emerge from changing socio-economic, technological, or environmental contexts. Within Design, we’ve ebbed and flowed between waterfall, Agile, iterative, and inclusive design thinking, among others.

As the leader of the Ethics & Society organization at Microsoft, I believe that responsible innovation is the next critical wave of design thinking. Traditional design schools don’t teach ethics, and people often don’t consider ethics a design problem. Today’s technologies are exciting and present tremendous opportunities to augment human abilities across a range of scenarios. At the same time, technologies without appropriate grounding in human-centered thinking, or appropriate mitigations and controls, present considerable challenges. These technologies have potential to injure people, undermine our democracies, and even erode human rights — and they’re growing in complexity, power, and ubiquity.

As a profession known for prioritizing human needs, design thinking is vital for building an ethical future. Expanding human-centered design to emphasize trust and responsibility is equally vital. As stewards of technology, we realize that today’s decisions may have irreversible and destructive impacts. This creates an urgent need to minimize disasters, conserve resources, and encourage responsible technological innovations.

The stakes are high, so we shouldn’t relegate design thinking solely to those with “design” in their title. As a noun, design is a profession, but as a verb, it’s the act of considered construction. Within Ethics & Society, we employ user researchers, designers, engineers, psychologists, ethicists, and more — all of whom design. We think of ethics as innovation material, and this diversity is critical to help our product teams innovate. Working with engineering teams, we also create holistic tools, frameworks, and processes to use in product development.

Learning to exercise your moral imagination to consider the socio-technical implications of what you create is a bedrock process of responsible innovation. Like any muscle, a moral imagination takes time to build. We’re launching a Responsible Innovation Practices Toolkit to help facilitate this, a set of practices based on our learnings from developing AI technologies within Microsoft. We’re launching the toolkit today with the Judgment Call card game, Harms Modeling, and Community Jury, and we’ll be regularly adding additional practices.

We’ll be the first to admit that we don’t have all the answers. Consider this toolkit a humble approach to sharing some of our learnings that might help all of us design technologies with more intention.

Judgment Call: A game to cultivate empathy

Avoiding conflict is a natural impulse for many, yet responsible innovation often rests on our ability to productively facilitate challenging conversations.

A round of Judgment Call and the writing of reviews.

Because games can help create safe spaces, we designed Judgment Call, an award-winning game and team-based activity that puts Microsoft AI principles of fairness, privacy and security, reliability and safety, transparency, inclusion, and accountability into action.

Judgment Call cultivates stakeholder empathy through role-playing and imagining scenarios. In the game, participants write product reviews from the perspective of a particular stakeholder, describing what impact and harms the technology could produce from that person’s point of view. Beyond creating empathy, Judgment Call gives technology creators a vocabulary and interactive tool to lead ethics discussions during product development.

This game is not intended to replace performing robust user research, but it can help tech builders learn to exercise their moral imagination.

Harms Modeling: An exercise to imagine real-world repercussions

Most product creators are keenly aware of technology’s ability to harm and earnestly aim to do the opposite. Still, technologies meant to increase public safety are often in tension with privacy, and mechanisms for democratizing information can also be used to manipulate and spread false information.

To identify and mitigate harmful effects, we need to learn how to look around corners and articulate what could go wrong. It’s easy to operate under a shared understanding, only to later learn that “harm” meant something very different to you than it did your coworkers. Or that your entire team wasn’t representative enough to fully imagine harmful consequences.

Because we can’t protect against something that we can’t clearly describe, a few years ago the team began exploring how we might create a shared taxonomy of harms to facilitate the important conversation of mitigations and controls. It’s more of an art than science, and it takes practice. The Harms Modeling exercise guides you in envisioning harms (like psychological distress, opportunity loss, environmental impact, etc.) that could stem from your technology along vectors such as severity, impact, frequency, and likelihood. It’s akin to threat modeling in security, which uses landscape assessments to understand the trust boundaries and surface areas of attack.