HD·R3·03 Research
Emerging Technology & Design
Designing responsibly around technology that is still changing shape.
Emerging technologies, AI, new materials, biotechnology, create design opportunities and risks before their full implications are understood. This course covers evaluating emerging technology critically for design application, and designing responsibly under genuine technical and ethical uncertainty.
In Development
This course's full module content is being written. The outline below is final, subscribe for updates when it publishes.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
- 01 Evaluate an emerging technology's design implications critically, beyond hype
- 02 Identify the genuine uncertainties surrounding a new technology's real-world behaviour
- 03 Design responsibly under conditions of incomplete technical and ethical understanding
- 04 Distinguish an emerging technology's marketed narrative from its demonstrated capability
- 05 Anticipate second-order social effects of designing with a new technology
- 06 Build in reversibility and monitoring for designs built on unproven technology
- Marketed narrative and demonstrated capability are often not the same thing
- Critical evaluation should focus on current, demonstrated capability first
- Developer confidence does not eliminate genuine early-stage uncertainty
- Planning should assume incomplete understanding, not assumed mastery
- Reversibility and staged rollout hedge against unknown failure modes
- Full-scale commitment to unproven technology increases risk disproportionately
- Second-order social effects are common and often unanticipated
- Anticipation before deployment is more responsible than reacting after
- Ethical questions can remain unsettled even as technical maturity increases
- Ongoing vigilance is required, not a single upfront ethical clearance
- Post-deployment monitoring compensates for the limits of pre-deployment testing
- This should be designed in from the start, not added after a problem surfaces