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Learn how to design and prototype a chatbot that doesn’t reinforce harmful gender stereotypes.
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About This Course
We live in an age of conversations powered by artificial intelligence. From customer service chatbots to bots that help you meditate, conversational interfaces are becoming part of our everyday lives – some helping us to automate human work, and others aiming to improve wellbeing.
Yet chatbots can easily reinforce harmful gender stereotypes or promote discriminatory behavior if their designers aren’t careful.
In this course, you’ll study feminism and its relationship to technology in order to help you build a feminist chatbot. You’ll learn feminist design tools and basic coding skills, before applying them to designing and programming a chatbot of your own.
Syllabus
- Week 1
Chatbots and the problem of bias
- Week 2
Applying feminist design principles
- Week 3
Designing chatbot conversations
- Week 4
Developing your prototyping skills
Learning on this course
You can take this self-guided course and learn at your own pace. On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.
What will you achieve?
By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to…
- Explore current uses of chatbots and how they work
- Interpret concepts of feminism and their relationship to technology
- Explore feminist design tools and how they can be applied to chatbot development
- Design a chatbot conversation using Whimsical flowcharts
- Produce a prototype of a chatbot using Glitch, a community programming environment
Who is the course for?
This course is for anyone interested in the social implications of technology, specifically the ethical issues surrounding chatbot design.
People curious about coding would benefit from this course, as would academics in the feminist or tech communities.
You might also be interested in the other courses in the Essential Creative Technologies collection from UAL Creative Computing Institute, Lancaster University, and the Institute of Coding.
What software or tools do you need?
We’ll be asking you to use some other online tools and platforms such as Glitch during the course.
