The Theory, Practice, and Ethical Challenges of Designing a Diversity-Aware Platform for Social Relations

TL;DR

This paper explores designing a diversity-aware social platform that promotes user well-being, leveraging diversity to foster meaningful interactions, while addressing ethical challenges and involving students in the design process.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for operationalizing diversity and discusses ethical considerations in creating a diversity-aware social platform.

Findings

A framework for defining student diversity was developed.

Diversity data collection enabled the creation of diversity-aware algorithms.

Reflections on ethical challenges informed the platform design process.

Abstract

Diversity-aware platform design is a paradigm that responds to the ethical challenges of existing social media platforms. Available platforms have been criticized for minimizing users' autonomy, marginalizing minorities, and exploiting users' data for profit maximization. This paper presents a design solution that centers the well-being of users. It presents the theory and practice of designing a diversity-aware platform for social relations. In this approach, the diversity of users is leveraged in a way that allows like-minded individuals to pursue similar interests or diverse individuals to complement each other in a complex activity. The end users of the envisioned platform are students, who participate in the design process. Diversity-aware platform design involves numerous steps, of which two are highlighted in this paper: 1) defining a framework and operationalizing the "diversity" of students, 2) collecting "diversity" data to build diversity-aware algorithms. The paper further reflects on the ethical challenges encountered during the design of a diversity-aware platform.