No App is an Island: Collective Action and Sustainable Development Goal-Sensitive Design.

Steph Pitt; Marlína van Meelis Lacey; Ed Scaife; Jeremy Pitt

doi:10.9781/ijimai.2021.02.005

Authors

Steph Pitt Imperial College London
Marlína van Meelis Lacey Imperial College London
Ed Scaife Imperial College London
Jeremy Pitt Imperial College London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.9781/ijimai.2021.02.005

Keywords:

Socio-Technical Systems, Value-Sensitive Design, Collective Action, Plug-in Architecture, Sustainable Development Goals

Supporting Agencies

We are grateful to the Association for Information Technology Trust (AITT) for support for project PlatformOcean. We also thank the organisers of the ECAI2020 AI4Eq Workshop, and the anonymous reviewers of various submissions for their many encouraging comments and helpful recommendations.

Abstract

The transformation to the Digital Society presents a challenge to engineer ever more complex socio-technical systems in order to address wicked societal problems. Therefore, it is essential that these systems should be engineered with respect not just to conventional functional and non-functional requirements, but also with respect to satisfying qualitative human values, and assessing their impact on global challenges, such as those expressed by the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). In this paper, we present a set of sets of design principles and an associated meta-platform, which focus design of socio-technical systems on the potential interaction of human and artificial intelligence with respect to three aspects: firstly, decision-support with respect to the codification of deep social knowledge; secondly, visualisation of community contribution to successful collective action; and thirdly, systemic improvement with respect to the SDGs through impact assessment and measurement. This methodology, of SDG-Sensitive Design, is illustrated through the design of two collective action apps, one for encouraging plastic re-use and reducing plastic waste, and the other for addressing redistribution of surplus food. However, as with the inter-connectedness of the SDGs, we conclude by arguing that the inter-connectedness of the Digital Society implies that system development cannot be undertaken in isolation from other systems.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

[1] B. Friedman, P. Kahn, A. Borning, “Value sensitive design and information systems,” in The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, K. Himma, H. Tavani Eds., Wiley, 2008, pp. 69–101.

[2] K. Bellman, J. Botev, H. Hildmann, P. Lewis, S. Marsh, J. Pitt, I. Scholtes, S. Tomforde, “Socially-sensitive systems design: Exploring social potential,” IEEE Tech. Soc. Mag., vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 72–80, 2017.

[3] H. Rittel, M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning,” Policy Sciences, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 155–169, 1973.

[4] S. Zuboff, “Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization,” Journal of Information Technology, vol. 30, pp. 75–89, 2015.

[5] H. Simon, “Rational choice and the structure of the environment,” Psychological Review, vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 129–138, 1956.

[6] T. Hák, S. Janoušková, B. Moldan, “Sustainable development goals: A need for relevant indicators,” Ecological Indicators, vol. 60, pp. 565 – 573, 2016.

[7] Common Fund for Commodities, “The sustainable development goals and impact measurement – a CFC journey.” Annual Report, 2017.

[8] E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990.

[9] J. Ober, Democracy and Knowledge. Princeton Univ. Press, 2008.

[10] D. B. Kurka, J. Pitt, J. Ober, “Knowledge management for selforganised resource allocation,” TAAS, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1:1–1:41, 2019.

[11] J. Ober, Demopolis: Democracy before liberalism in theory and practice. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017.

[12] J. Pitt, J. Ober, “Democracy by design: Basic democracy and the selforganisation of collective governance,” in IEEE SASO, 2018, pp. 20–29.

[13] B. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922.

[14] J. Pitt, J. H. Clippinger, C. Sørensen, “Values, axial currencies, and computational axiology: Digital currencies can do more than buy stuff,” IEEE Technol. Soc. Mag., vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 56–63, 2018.

[15] N. Rescher, Distributive Justice. Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.

[16] A. Rychwalska, G. Goodell, M. Roszczynska-Kurasinska, “Data management for platform-mediated public services: Challenges and best practices,” CoRR, vol. abs/1909.07143, 2019.

[17] J. Zittrain, The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

[18] T. Hardjono, P. Deegan, J. Clippinger, “Social use cases for the ID3 open mustard seed platform,” Technology & Society Magazine, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 48–54, 2014.

[19] S. Robert, H. Robert, W. Evans, D. Honemann, T. Balch, Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised, 10th ed. Perseus Publishing, 2000.

[20] A. Manjarrés, A. Pickin, M. A. Artaso, E. Gibbons, “Ai4eq: for a true global village not for global pillage,” Technology & Society Magazine, vol. 40, no. 1, 2021.

[21] Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, “Global food losses and food waste – extent, causes and prevention.” http://www.fao.org/3/mb060e/mb060e00.pdf.

[22] Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, “Food wastage footprint and climate change.” http://www.fao.org/3/a-bb144e.pdf.

[23] C. Hanson, P. Mitchell, The Business Case for Reducing Food Loss and Waste. Washington, DC: Champions 12.3, 2017.

[24] E. Facchini, E. Lacovidou, J. Gronow, N. Voulvoulis, “Food flows in the united kingdom: The potential of surplus food redistribution to reduce waste,” Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association, vol. 68, no. 9, pp. 887–899, 2018.

[25] D. Schiff, B. Rakova, A. Ayesh, A. Fanti, M. Lennon, “Explaining the principles to practices gap in AI,” Technology & Society Magazine, vol. 40, no. 1, 2021.

[26] A. Luccioni, Y. Bengio, “On the morality of artificial intelligence,” IEEE Tech. Soc. Mag., vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 16–25, 2020.