A data platform for governing data platforms.
Michael D. Smith, Andrew Witt
Origo
Output Type
Role
Master's Thesis
Action

About

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the tech industry goes through an ethical reckoning. This thesis for the design engineering program at Harvard synthesizes and distills the cultural discourse around tech ethics into a speculative platform that pragmatically resolves the problem. Although speculative, the platform is not a video but an interactive digital prototype that simulates an object and context in a fictional near-future. The undertaking of this project was also a methodological synthesis of wicked problems, design thinking, and data engineering. Methods developed from this class was applied to the USCIS and generalized into a studio curriculum at the University of Michigan.

Problem

It is how we design product, not what product we design, that leads to ethical problems.

Solution

Origo connects the product team with the information they need to anticipate and mitigate ethical problems at the point of design.