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The IDEO team came up with an original design, iterated on them, and landed on a set of four design principles and ten activities that can help guide an ethically responsible, culturally considerate, and humanistic approach to designing with data. These activities are meant to provoke thought; they’re a vehicle for introducing new ideas and stimulating conversations around ethics throughout the design process.

The four principles are:

• 1. Data is not truth: Data is human-driven. Humans create, generate, collect, capture, and extend data. The results are often incomplete, and the process of analyzing them can be messy. Data can be biased through what is included or excluded, how it is interpreted, and how it is presented. Unpacking the human influence on data is essential to understanding how it can best serve our needs.
• 2. Don’t presume the desirability of AI: Just because AI can do something doesn’t mean that it should. When AI is incorporated into a design, designers should continually pay attention to whether people’s needs are changing, or an AI’s behavior is changing.
• 3. Respect privacy and the collective good: While there are policies and laws that shape the governance, collection, and use of data, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard than “will we get sued?” Consider design, governance of data use for new purposes, and communication of how people’s data will be used.
• 4. Unintended consequences of AI are opportunities for design: Just as with any design endeavor, we know that we’re not going to get it right the first time. Use unanticipated consequences and new unknowns as starting points for iteration.