The Theory, Practice, and Ethical Challenges of Designing a Diversity-Aware Platform for Social Relations

Diversity-aware platform design is a paradigm that responds to
the ethical challenges of existing social media platforms. Available
platforms have been criticized for minimizing users’ autonomy,
marginalizing minorities, and exploiting users’ data for profit maximization. This paper presents a design solution that centers the
well-being of users. It presents the theory and practice of designing
a diversity-aware platform for social relations. In this approach, the
diversity of users is leveraged in a way that allows like-minded
individuals to pursue similar interests or diverse individuals to
complement each other in a complex activity. The end users of the
envisioned platform are students, who participate in the design
process. Diversity-aware platform design involves numerous steps,
of which two are highlighted in this paper: 1) defining a framework
and operationalizing the "diversity" of students, 2) collecting "diversity" data to build diversity-aware algorithms. The paper further
reflects on the ethical challenges encountered during the design of
a diversity-aware platform.