About the Project

Vision Statement

Origo believes the future of tech ethics lies in creating a continuous feedback loop between software development and regulatory legislation and having a diversity of stakeholders participate without needing to be "technical." This democratizes the construction of data models that structure our everyday interactions while grounding ethics in context and operations so we can do good rather than just talk about what good looks like.

Mission Statement

Origo connects the product team with the information they need to anticipate and mitigate ethical problems at the point of design.

Reasons to believe

Lawyer-in-the-Loop

Base requirements are collected directly from lawyers so the product team can bootstrap their data model and design ethically without costly refactors.

Visible Ethical Value

Protocols that become design requirements can be created and reused by lawyers, traced, and audited at scale so that the product team's work is visible and of consumer value.

Input Diversity

Context on design problems are collected through references representing a spectrum of temporal change and diversity of stakeholders.

Product Knowledge Management

References and requirements are collected and managed in direct relation to the product data model so that context is never divorced from object.

Problem Statement

It is how* we design product, not what product we design, that leads to ethical problems.

* 1) People, 2) Process

Case Studies

Problem Analysis

opportunity Analysis

Scaling Start-up System Pressure & Process Map

Employee User Journey & Platform Interventions

Contextual Ethical Factors

Domain Culture unfolding

Lawyer Data Audit Task flow & Platform Validation

Framework

I love design methods, so I had a couple things I wanted to explore about methods when going through this project.
1. Whether strategic foresight could meet speculative design.
2. How architecture design methods could blend with digital product design ones, particularly concurrent problem-solution exploration and descriptive geometry practices (unfolding, triangulation, etc).
3. What it's like to bound and work through a very broad problem space, because you never get to choose those bounds in practice.

methods

Continuous Prototypes

Continuous Testing

Faculty Advisors

Andrew Witt
Associate Professor of Practice in Architecture
@HarvardGSD @CertainMeasures

Michael D. Smith
John H. Finley, Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences
@HarvardSEAS

External Advisor

Tom Dayton
Design Thinking Facilitator
@IBM

Arianna Mazzeo
Senior Researcher
@MIT

Research & Testing Stakeholders

All the in-house CEOs, CTOs, VPs of Product, product designers, product managers, and backend engineers who preferred to remain anonymous when talking about ethics.
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Domains included:
- Delivery
- Social Media
- Manufacturing
- Marketing
- Agriculture
- Architecture

Valérie Dubois, David Ibanez, Jorge Barros | Wyss Institute
Jero Beccar | Hyka Therapeutics
Chien-Min Lu | daytoday Health
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez | GSD
All the people at All Tech is Human
Michael Muller | IBM Research
Dawn Ahukanna | IBM Research
Sana Sharma | IBM / GSD
Sarah Newman | (meta)Lab

Validation Stakeholders

Mason Kortz | Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic, Berkman Klein

Moral Support

Martin Bechthold
Mary Tolikas
Nishu Lahoti
Arushi Saxena
Barbara Alonso
Cate Tompkins
Elizabeth Price
My Instagram Story Audience

Who left work to do work about work during the latest season of harvard, zoom edition?
I did.