Celina Thomsen

Before studying at the RCA, I did a BSc in Digital Design and Interactive Technologies at the IT University of Copenhagen. My undergraduate introduced me to design thinking and allowed me to explore design from a digital and technoloical perspective.

During my time at the RCA and through working with clients varying from the London Firebrigade, Ernst & Young, Boston Consulting Group as well as a charity, an AI company and a design agency, I have applied and developed my skills and experience within different contexts. Particularly, my time at the RCA has encouraged me to acquire a creative confidence in my own approach and thinking of design.

Further, working in multidisciplinary teams with people across different nationalities and cultures has allowed me to widen my perspective by challenging and being confronted with my own biases and ideologies. It has led me to gain collaborative know-how, having to find a common ground and language in these settings.

In my final project, I worked with Raphaelle de Beaumont (Service Design) in partnership with the Danish Design Centre on the topic of digital ethics. We focused on developing tools for organisations to think more ethically in the design of their digital products and services. A special thanks to friend and colleague, Raphaelle for the incredible work and determination in these times.

Using different design approaches, we can question the process, the system and what is given, which I believe is how we can challenge a better future.

In one of my latest projects, I worked alongside my group with a nonprofit design studio to improve mental well-being in the workplace. We have approached this brief through a speculative design process where we, through workshops, future scenarios and artefact design, have explored how work in the future could and should look like. Future scenario planning has then informed which steps we can design today to get to a preferred state. Using speculative design alongside service design has allowed us to mix radical thinking with more pragmatic thinking and stretch our creativity to take on more significant challenges.

In our final project, Raphaelle de Beaumont and I took on the critical topic of ethics within the tech industry. Taking on such a topic required us to have patience, be confident and be creative in our approach. Ultimately, we managed to make ethics an approachable practice within the start-up community and launch a beta version of our service in the summer.

Although you have the flexibility to tackle such significant topics as a student, I believe it's also a strength with service design. The discipline is and should be working towards applying its methods to systemic issues.

The approach — Although various open-source ethics tools exist online, none of them gets the attention and uses they deserve. Ethics is either perceived strictly regarding the law; it's too subjective and/or too intangible. Watch the video to understand the project background and initial insights of approaching start-ups about digital et

The service — Through an introduction to digital ethics, discussion prompts and a Digital Ethics Sprint, start-up teams are pushed to see the blindspots of their solution. They then create an action plan for a chosen ethical risk or dilemma. The program is run by us at the incubator’s space, with the help of affiliates from the Danish Design Centre.

Putting ethics in the face of start-ups — Start-ups' attention can be scarce when it comes to focusing on digital ethics. So we chose to deliver our solution through incubators instead of creating another open source tool. We prototyped provocative question prompts such as 'If Trump had your product in hand, what would he do with it?'. We printed these on cards and beers and sent them to start-ups, resulting in the creation of the Devil's Advocate card deck, sold at our F*** Ethics truck that we drive to incubators' HQ as an awareness touchpoint.

Making ethics practical — We created a one-hour workshop called Digital Ethics Sprint that we tested with three start-ups. In the workshop, founders and their product teams map out their direct and indirect stakeholders before being assigned to one of these. They then write a review of their digital product through the eyes of this stakeholder. Lastly, start-ups map the ethical dilemmas and risks they found and reflect on potential actions. The intention is to present and action plan to the rest of the cohort.

Digital ethics as a business imperative — A crucial part of our project was to provide the right incentive for start-ups to practice digital ethics. Meaning not just highlighting the unfair consequences on humans but highlighting the impact on the business itself. And in fact, not ethically developing a product can end up being costly for start-ups, whether through GDPR or other regulatory fines, losing investors-, employees'- and customers' trust, or even going out of market due to media backlash.

Bringing F*** Ethics to life — We will be piloting a compressed version of the program with Innofounder Graduate, an incubator based in Copenhagen. We will roll out further by leveraging resources from the Danish Design Centre and Innovation Fund Denmark. In the future we see F*** Ethics becoming an independent training company dedicated to tech start-ups, with interventions funded by incubators and accelerators.

Insecure data handling, biased automation, deceptive interfaces... Tech companies have been going under increasing media scrutiny for having negative impact on humans. What if we could give them tools at the beginning of their product development process in order to prevent such unethical consequences?

Working alongside the Danish Design Centre based in Copenhagen, Raphaelle and I took on the challenge of making digital ethics a common practice in the tech start-up community. We wished to contribute to build more respectful technologies and make ethical design a competitive advantage in Europe's tech industry.

Embarking on such a big and cross functional topic was a very fulfilling experience. We would like to thank our tutor from RCA, Jane, the Digital Ethics Compass team at the Danish Design Centre, and Innofounder Graduate for supporting this project. And thank you to all the great start-ups who crash tested our ideas!

In Collaboration with:

Raphaelle de Beaumont

The current state: tech employees experience high levels of anxiety and stress — Tech workers are 5 times more depressed than the general UK population. Despite current wellbeing initiatives such as flexible workspaces or gym discounts these high stress levels could be attributed to 2 factors. 1. The sector is marked by rapid innovation cycles, high VCs’ demands and intense work pace inherited from Silicon Valley start-up culture. 2. As the industry is very dynamic, employees sometimes struggle to know how and when to update their skills to stay relevant within the industry.

Let's jump to 2030 — Speculative design allowed us to question a current discourse around ‘hacking yourself’ to cope with intense working conditions and look into redesigning the work conditions themselves. We imagined a future scenario occurring in the 2030s based on the idea of a 3-hour work day. Owing to advanced machinery, the 8-hour work day was shortened from an average 10-14 hour work day. With the current technological progress, couldn’t this trend result in a further reduction?

Giving life to our scenario — Libratus and Tech Society Latest act as ‘artefacts’ for immersing our audience in the future we created, with the purpose of provoking thoughts and inspiring current actions. We pushed the audience to ask ‘what if?’ rather than ‘is this feasible?’. What could happen if we only work for three hours? Is working less desirable? As we exposed people to this scenario in a workshop, we refined our story taking into account fears, hopes and new ideas.

Briefs for the 'now' — 1. Tech companies should gradually implement shorter work weeks, seeing hours worked does not equal to productivity 2. Tech companies need to reduce demands put on employees 3. Employers should get help to identify their most productive working hours 4. Tech organisations should support learning opportunities outside of work 5. Tech organisations should ensure a psychologically safe environment 6. Employees and employers should share responsibility towards wellbeing.

A speculative design project exploring our future relationship with work and its consequences on wellbeing, specifically within the tech industry. Through an imaginary scenario, we question current work hours structures, opening up for design opportunities.

The ‘design for good’ agency Fuzzy and the Royal Society of Medicine wanted to re-imagine work with regards to mental health. This meant envisioning work-place cultures that support good mental health, in order to make working life inside and outside work healthier, happier and more productive. Indeed, the number of workers experiencing mental health issues has increased as a consequence of prevailing ‘always on’ working behaviours, accentuated by the new working conditions brought by Covid. Both partners helped us to access people working in tech companies to interview. We then had the freedom to imagine a future scenario and define design opportunities fitted back into the existing work lifestyle.

In Collaboration with:

Tanushka Karad

Raphaelle de Beaumont

Financial abuse as a vulnerability — Within the spectrum of vulnerability, we focused on financial abuse within relationships. Financial abuse is a subtle form of control of one’s finances leading to situations of dependence, touching 1 in 5 people in the UK (being mainly women). Examples range from monitoring one’s expenses by constantly asking the victim what they have spent money on to taking credits under their name in secret.

Insights — Couples are taking joint accounts later than generations prior. They have thus already formed some shared financial behaviour once they open a joint account. Money conversations are tricky to tackle and can lead to potential conflicts linked to different spending habits, and fear of confrontation. Money splitting apps are not designed for long term expense sharing between couples and are very manual. Existing solutions lack an overview and are strictly focused on money management, not on engagement.

Koi — We created Koi; an expense sharing service for young couples who are spending the majority of their daily expenses with their partner but lack an overview of their shared expenses and experience discomfort talking about their money. Koi provides insights into these shared expenditures alongside conversation nudges in order to increase couples’ openness to money talks and create an enjoyable expense sharing experience.

Impact — In this project, we sparked conversations just by interviewing people, who shared words such as ‘I had never questioned the decision of taking a joint account’ or ‘I didn’t know this situation could be considered as an abuse’ all along the process. Additionally, our contact from a charity, who is in touch with many victims of financial abuse believed that should survivors have had access to Koi, some could have been able to spot controlling tendencies or conflicting behaviours early on, building resilience.

With growing regulations from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), banks are compelled to take better care of potentially vulnerable customers. It is with this new catalyst that my group and I engaged in helping financial organisations minimise the risk of harm to vulnerable customers, interacting with their financial products and services.

Our goal was to imagine a financial service that would reduce the risk of financial abuse and increase customers’ resilience by growing awareness of the problem and encouraging money talks among couples. Although this level of resilience is influenced by other factors such as level of financial awareness, family and personal traits, we could be a stepping stone in making people less vulnerable to such situations.

In Collaboration with:

Raphaelle de Beaumont

Benedetta Locatelli

Chi Hu

Celina Thomsen

In Collaboration with:

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Royal College of Art