Recommending With, Not For: Co-Designing Recommender Systems for Social Good

TL;DR

This paper advocates for participatory co-design of recommender systems for social good, emphasizing collaboration with stakeholders to align social objectives with system development.

Contribution

It introduces a shift from designer-centric to stakeholder-inclusive co-design approaches for socially beneficial recommender systems.

Findings

Current systems reflect designers' social goals and evaluations.

Participatory processes can better align systems with stakeholder interests.

Co-design enhances accountability and social impact.

Abstract

Recommender systems are usually designed by engineers, researchers, designers, and other members of development teams. These systems are then evaluated based on goals set by the aforementioned teams and other business units of the platforms operating the recommender systems. This design approach emphasizes the designers' vision for how the system can best serve the interests of users, providers, businesses, and other stakeholders. Although designers may be well-informed about user needs through user experience and market research, they are still the arbiters of the system's design and evaluation, with other stakeholders' interests less emphasized in user-centered design and evaluation. When extended to recommender systems for social good, this approach results in systems that reflect the social objectives as envisioned by the designers and evaluated as the designers understand them. Instead, social goals and operationalizations should be developed through participatory and democratic processes that are accountable to their stakeholders. We argue that recommender systems aimed at improving social good should be designed *by* and *with*, not just *for*, the people who will experience their benefits and harms. That is, they should be designed in collaboration with their users, creators, and other stakeholders as full co-designers, not only as user study participants.