Who gets to design new healthtech products? Who are these designed for? How can we do design differently and more inclusively?

This hands-on creative workshop will explore how emerging technologies such as automated decision-making (ADM) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being designed, understood, and imagined within contexts of health and wellbeing, and what better and more inclusive futures can be developed. ADM and AI technologies are predicted to have a profound impact on health practices and medical care globally, with applications ranging from diagnostic and therapeutic to lifestyle and social wellbeing. Popular narratives position these technologies in often wildly variable ways: e.g., as replacing human doctors or as evil robots. Such portrayals partly result from the fact that ADM and AI technologies are poorly understood: there are no widely agreed upon definitions or explanations of these technologies.

We invite participants to join us in reimagining healthtech and its futures through cultural probes. These will involve writing and image-making to reflect on the social contexts of their own technology use: for example by mapping the relationships between people and the things that they feel matter to their health and wellbeing (see our concept image). The activities will also involve designing some speculative healthcare ideas: for instance by creating a manual that unpacks the ‘black box’ of a futuristic AI device. In the process, we will work through critical issues of trust, social impact, inclusiveness, wellbeing, ethics and explainability. Together participants will experiment with sociological design methods that offer an alternative way of understanding and materialising the social and material contexts of health technology design and use, both in the present and into the future.

Presented by Ash Watson, Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society