THE CONTEXT

Evidence suggests that product design decisions often lead to significant social impacts concerning population change, gender inequality, education, stratification, health and wellbeing, and human rights, among others. Yet, current product design practices are predominantly focused on economic and environmental impacts, and little is known about the social sustainability of designed products.

THE PROBLEM

There are several underlying issues with integrating social sustainability and product design.

1. Existing methods to elicit the needs of users are mostly based on human interaction and assessment activities, which are limited in the scope of the data collected and rely on human assessment, experience, and intuition to develop unique insights.
2. Bias, a lack of diversity, and limited inclusion are challenges designers must overcome as they design new products for the global community.
3. The Internet, digital platforms, social media, and mobile devices have enabled users to interact, share opinions, and discuss the products and services they use at scale. However, existing sentiment analysis methods are mostly limited to extracting general favorability metrics from user reviews, leaving the fundamental “latent” needs of individuals/society unknown.
4. There is a lack of computational methods to translate these insights into new, explorative ways to increase the quantity, quality, and diversity of new design knowledge and concepts. 

THE SOLUTION

We envision a substantial opportunity to devise an AI framework to fundamentally enhance designers’ ability to innovate “socially-aware” products by identifying pressing and latent societal needs from social media and e-commerce platforms and automatically generating design concept recommendations for designers informed by those needs.

THE IMPACT