Alma Leora Culén, Nicholas Sebastian Stevens, and Jasmin Niess
Towards mitigating threats to democratic values
Alma Leora Culén, Nicholas Sebastian Stevens, and Jasmin Niess
Technology design is increasingly seen as being fraught with challenges tied to extractive economic models and political power. The rapid advancement of the use of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the form of generative AI, has intensified these concerns by reshaping how information is produced, disseminated, and consumed, primarily through social media. AI-curated content has been linked to increased political polarisation, erosion of democracy, and large-scale data exploitation. Nevertheless, AI-based technologies also hold promise for strengthening governance and civic participation. The potential of such technologies for both desirable and undesirable societal consequences raises a question about the role interaction designers play in aligning AI-based systems with democratic values.
In this exploratory paper, we examine how designers’ assumptions, values, worldviews, and attitudes—their mindset and posture—influence technology design and how these orientations evolve with professional experience.
To empirically ground this inquiry, we conducted a questionnaire-based study with two groups of interaction designers (n = 11 each), differentiated by their level of experience. The first group consisted of interaction design students, while the second group consisted of experienced professionals. Our findings reveal that experienced designers exhibit greater ethical awareness, confidence in addressing democratic concerns, and a deeper understanding of power and organisational dynamics. In contrast, student designers tend to express more uncertainty and focus more on individual responsibility. These differences highlight the need for educational and organisational structures that promote critical reflection and ethical engagement, suggesting that designing for democracy depends on designers’ mindset and posture, that experience matters, and that the institutional context influences these effects.
KEYWORDS: systemic design, deep democracy, participatory design, artificial intelligence.