PhD Studentship in Designing AI for Home Wellbeing through Participatory Design

Moving beyond AI that enhances human capabilities and avoids negative impacts, this PhD project will explore how participatory design, rather than traditional design approaches, can be used to design AI for home wellbeing. Wellbeing is defined here as supporting a broad range of human needs to promote human flourishing—an evolving state of living that enables one to meet maximum psychosocial potential by satisfying all fundamental human needs for wellbeing.

Taking a participatory design approach this project will:

1. explore the concept of home wellbeing with an end-user group (e.g. older adults, new parents)
2. use findings to collaboratively design AI concepts for home wellbeing with AI experts and end-users
3. compare the approach with a traditional design approach such as user-centred design
4. evaluate the value of using a participatory design approach for designing AI for home wellbeing 

Designing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for wellbeing is becoming more imperative as AI applications increasingly broadens and affects everyday life. AI can predict emerging patterns and/or categories from real-time data (e.g. of images, video clips, sounds, or text) and is increasingly used to make significant societal decisions such as hiring, loan approvals and prison sentencing. 

As AI and home wellbeing are multifaceted concepts, designing AI for home wellbeing requires interdisciplinary and end-user collaboration facilitated through a design approach. Currently, a lack of universal AI regulation, interdisciplinary language, and methods for engaging end-users in AI development creates barriers for designing AI for home wellbeing, generating public mistrust and limited collaboration between disciplines. This PhD project will tackle some of these key issues by contributing a participatory design approach to the designing AI for home wellbeing research agenda.

Open to any UK or international candidates. Up to 30% of our UKRI funded studentships can be awarded to candidates paying international rate fees. Find out more about eligibility.

Besides meeting the entry criteria for our PhD programme, this project requires strong conceptual thinking and design thinking ability, excellent knowledge of different artificial intelligence applications and willingness to undertake additional training in this area. Candidates should also have a background in either a design (i.e. service design, product design) or related technology (i.e. human computer interaction, people-centred AI) field with a strong interest or engagement in user experience and/or wellbeing. We are also looking for highly driven and independent candidates with advanced writing and communication skills who will exercise tenacity in advancing the designing AI for home wellbeing field.

Research groups:

• Special interest group Home Wellbeing
• Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP)
• Digital World Research Centre (DWRC)
• Environmental Psychology Research Group (EPRG)