Interaction with robots and other autonomous agents is becoming increasingly common in many industries and contexts. With this, there is an increased need to consider how we integrate employees into the design and implementation of these processes to support more equitable outcomes. This talk will center on two design workshops with industry employees that investigate autonomous agent design and implementation, focusing on considering the equity and justice dimensions of integrating these systems and empowering employees around the personality and role design (e.g. personas) of autonomous agents for human-agent collaboration. These projects demonstrate how employee-agent interactions can be better designed and implemented, considering aspects including autonomy, power dynamics, anthropomorphization, and societal dimensions.
Dr. Anastasia Kouvaras Ostrowski is an Assistant Professor in User Experience Design at Purdue University. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) and in the MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group. Her work explores equitable design of robots, AI systems, and design education through co-design, participatory design, and design justice approaches, working with roboticists, co-designers, and policy thinkers. Anastasia received her PhD in media arts and sciences from MIT, focused on equitable technology design, and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan, focused on engineering design processes and idea generation.