Voices of Tomorrow: Redesigning Refugee Resettlement Decision-Making Systems
A range of factors can have a bearing on quality of life and long-term outcomes for refugees who have been resettled.
Increasingly, automated and algorithmic systems are being used to make decisions that impact on people’s lives. But little, if any consideration is given to helping the commissioners, designers and operators of these systems to consider the knock-on effects of the decisions being made.
Using speculative design approaches that stem from a worldbuilding approach we partnered with Parallel to explore future interfaces for refugee settlement systems. We utilised a combination of matching algorithms, computational simulations and generative synthetic media, with the aim of building a more nuanced and multidimensional view of the outcomes of automated decision making – for both refugees and host localities.
Voices of Tomorrow is a research and development initiative that reimagines refugee resettlement decision-making systems as a near-future system combining storytelling, conversational AI, agent-based modelling and new creative technologies in order to deliver the best possible outcomes for individuals and communities. By simulating and dramatising the results of different assumptions about policy, Voices of Tomorrow takes a different approach to the design challenge of how to respond to complex societal issues, moving beyond conventional ‘personas’ of user-centred design. It leads to transformational opportunities to redirect policy and technology design towards a better understanding of the needs of stakeholders. It also opens up new areas of AI-Human Interaction to study, in connection with narrative and worldbuilding, the implications of which need to be understood further.
For more, see: https://voices-of-tomorrow.com/
Credits:
Voices of Tomorrow design sketch. Plotting the matches between refugee cases and locations.