Last week I was invited to give a seminar and workshop with the Anthropology Masters students at University of Amsterdam about putting my anthropology training into practice. As part of that workshop I developed two activities to get the students to think about the world from unfamiliar perspectives using design…

Wellcome is working towards a world in which no-one is held back by mental health problems. This has never been more urgent. Mental health problems are set to become the largest burden of disease globally by 2030, but although there is an ever-growing range of treatments and prevention initiatives, there…

We’re excited to announce that the MindKind Study (formerly known as the Global Mental Health Databank) has launched in the UK and is about to go live in South Africa and India. As we move into the data collection phase of the study, here’s a quick update to share some…

A post about pluralism in data and AI and considering non-Western ethical frameworks like Ubuntu. In a recent Pew Research Centre survey of 602 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists, 68% indicated that they don’t think we’re heading towards AI designed for the public good within…

Notes from a workshop I ran as part of the Uroboros 2021 Festival, organised by the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. In the session, we used situated data analysis as a way of showing how data shapes our physical and social environments. Then we hand wrote break-up letters to Tinder and Glow. — Environmental Power and Data We live in a society with increasingly complex layers of data collection and use. As an individual, it’s often hard to know how to deal with this complexity.

Data ethics principles and processes are useful, but they are often of limited use when it comes to addressing the social and environmental harms of the data economy. This post is about using creative R&D to build data technologies that embed a different set of values from the ground up, balancing exploratory with experimental approaches to prove what works. — There’s a reason that data trusts are named one of the 10 breakthrough technologies of 2021 — they are a way of challenging the status quo. Governments and companies have mishandled data time and again. GDPR and other data protection regimes have technically given power back to the people, but…

It’s been a while since we last updated you on the progress of the Global Mental Health Databank so here’s a quick update of where we’ve got to. For those who haven’t come across the project before, the Global Mental Health Databank is a two-year feasibility study commissioned by Wellcome…

Networked technology has networked effects. These effects are often intangibly and recursively amplified through a system when machine learning is in use. Does human-centered design still make sense when we’re designing for AI? — This post considers some of the limitations of Human Centered Design for AI tech, and considers what happens if we think about relational design for data systems instead.