Inclusive AI- part 2 4000 47 minutes- In this session part 2, we trialed a new format (the Flipped Masterclass). Based on the feedback, this will become default in 2026 going forward! More fun to learn (more fun to facilitate), more applied learning and reflection. See Part 1 here... Two primer videos for this session:

VIDEO 1 (11 min)

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9qc232zenfbcmct57a649/Inclusive-AI-Flipped-part-1.mp4?rlkey=k1j17717hec94vlyp6ursc1a8&dl=0

VIDEO 2  (17 min)

 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/e2ug3acoeyzqf0ldr81d9/Inclusive-AI-Flipped-part-2.mp4?rlkey=7wmu53rzp4jbexicws2cje801&dl=0

 

part 2: Inclusive AI Masterclass_Flipped

From recruitment tools to chatbots and city services, AI is shaping decisions that affect people’s lives. When built without care, these systems can exclude, harm, or misrepresent. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If you’re building AI-powered products or services—this masterclass is for you.

AI can reflect bias, or it can challenge it. This masterclass is for teams building AI-powered products and services who want to do better. You’ll learn practical methods to design for inclusion from the start, avoid harm, and challenge biased systems. Through real-world examples, discussion, and guided activities, we’ll unpack what it means to build inclusive, human-centered AI (HCAI). This session is hands-on, collaborative, and focused on skills you can apply right away—across teams, tools, and workflows.

Topics We’ll Cover in this Inclusive AI Masterclass

• What Inclusive AI means: definitions, tensions, and opportunities
• Bias in AI: where it comes from and how it shows up
• Inclusive data practices (collection, labelling, and audit points)
• Ethical frameworks vs. lived experience insights
• Designing for edge cases and “extreme” users
• Inclusion prompts for model training and prompt engineering
• Techniques to co-design with underrepresented groups

About Monthly MasterClasses:

These monthly meet-ups are topic-driven live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions. Monthly MasterClasses are included as part of your membership. They allow a deep dive into important UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank’s two decades in the field. How to access this masterclass...

• Open Circle: FREE (Get it FREE>> Join Open Circle)
• Inner Circle: Included in your $99 a month Inner Circle membership (50% discount available) for all events plus Digital Library 250+ videos, mentoring, hands-on workshops and more...

Dec 9th (Open House FREE 30 min) 12PM-2PM ET/ 5...

Session 1: DEC 17th 9:00AM PST; 12:00PM EST; 17...

60 minutes Designing from Values, Driving with ...

Designing With, Not For: Participatory Techniques in Action 3979 NOV 20th  9:00AM PST; 12:00PM EST; 17:00PM GMT (London); 18:00PM CET 22:30 PM IST 60 minutes

• Non-member: $99 [wlm_stripe_btn sku=payperpost-3917 button_label="Buy Now" pay_button_label="Buy Now" coupon="1"]
• Open Circle: FREE (Get it FREE>> Join Open Circle)
• Inner Circle: Included in your $99 a month Inner Circle membership (50% discount available) for all events plus Digital Library 250+ videos, mentoring, hands-on workshops and more...

Masterclass-Designing With, Not For: Participatory Techniques in Action

If you hold power (like designers and devs) you can make mistakes. This shows up as assumption, bias or being exposed to unintended consequences. Power can limit our perspective.

Designers hold a subtle kind of power: every screen, journey map, or AI prompt embeds assumptions about who matters and who doesn’t. When left unchecked, those assumptions harden into bias, oversight, or harm.

Traditional UX has give us extractive approaches to dealing with our problem children: users.

UX research focuses on capturing, engaging, or gathering from users rather than working with them. This mindset produces distance: researchers extract; users stay disconnected from decisions- they are made behind the curtain.

Yes, this is the norm and we’re moving too fast to get relational with users. But in the age of AI, that gap is no longer safe. Systems learn from our choices, and when those choices are made in isolation, they scale our blind spots faster than ever.

Enter: Participatory Methods for Research, Design and Co-Production

Designing with, not for, means shifting from extraction to relationship. It asks us to share power across time, not just collect feedback once. It means creating safe spaces for lived experience, co-analyzing findings, and co-deciding directions. It involves learning with users, not over them—and bringing our organizations along so the learning becomes collective. In practice, that looks like multi-session collaboration, consent-based decisions, and participatory AI approaches where communities shape how systems behave. This is relational, trauma-informed design. It’s more deliberate about ‘quick’. It’s inclusive and accountable, but it’s also about releasing our power, and thereby making better design decisions. Participatory approaches are the kind of UX the AI era demands.

In this Masterclass, Frank will immerse you in the latest in a range of practiacal ways to weave in participatory methods for your UX and Service Design process. This includes codesign and coproduction. Join Frank as he shares field-tested methods and learn why it took him so many years to adopt these methods.

Agenda: Designing With, Not For: Participatory Techniques in Action

1) What’s absent in UX Research, Design and Delivery? Beyond Empathy toward Lived Expereince 2) Co-production over consultation. Share power from discovery to delivery. 3) Participatory mindset shifts: Bringing your organization along 4) Participatory AI: Building saftey, inclusion and ethics into AI projects 5) Q&A

About Monthly MasterClasses:

These monthly meet-ups are topic-driven live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions. Monthly MasterClasses are included as part of your membership. They allow a deep dive into important UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank’s 25 years in the field. How to access this masterclass...

• Open Circle: FREE (Get it FREE>> Join Open Circle)
• Inner Circle: Included in your $99 a month Inner Circle membership (50% discount available) for all events plus Digital Library 250+ videos, mentoring, hands-on workshops and more...

From North Stars to Guardrails: vision to values 3973 84 minutes

Vision and Values Masterclass: From North Stars to Guardrails

Values shape our behaviors. Vision aligns our direction. Yet too often, teams treat both as background noise— implied in roadmaps, buried in backlogs, or lost in delivery. Values are an issue of ‘alignment’ in AI. See: See Why Agentic AI needs user values 

We can no longer rely on values being implied. They need to be designed. Especially when designing for Inclusive AI.

In AI, drift shows up as bias or hallucination. In organizations, it shows up as cynicism, burnout, or “just following the process.” In both cases, it happens when nobody is checking alignment anymore.

“Drift” is an LLM behavior, where the language model erodes or ‘goes off-script’ over time. It’s important to design for it. Likewise, when values aren’t operational, they drift. And when they drift, culture follows. A poster on the wall doesn’t help you in a tough call. “Integrity” means nothing if it’s not part of your decision flow. Culture erodes when values aren’t in the room for trade-offs.

In this Masterclass, Frank Spillers will provide tested methods for bringing back values into AI design conversations (guardrails, drift) and to your team. He’ll connect vision (roadmaps) to values (principles) and share strategies for preventing cultural and AI drift while designing ethical and inclusive guardrails.

Why this matters:

AI is accelerating every decision, every interaction. Without grounded values, we risk automating bias, scaling harm, or following whoever shouts loudest—whether that’s a populist politician or a billionaire troll.

If you don’t design values into the work, you’re designing drift into your culture.
And in an AI-driven world, drift means bad experiences and compromised product development.

Join Frank to explore how to operationalise your organisation’s values, build meaningful guardrails, and design against drift. Because vision without values is chaos—and values without vision go nowhere.

Agenda: From North Stars to Guardrails: vision to values

1) Principles: How to operationalize your values at the design level 2) Guardrails: Defining guardrails for your design, AI strategy and your culture 3) Drift: Avoiding drift in LLM design and in your culture 4) Q&A

About Monthly MasterClasses:

These monthly meet-ups are topic-driven live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions. Monthly MasterClasses are included as part of your membership. They allow a deep dive into important UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank’s 25 years in the field. How to access this masterclass...

• Open Circle: FREE (Get it FREE>> Join Open Circle)
• Inner Circle: Included in your $99 a month Inner Circle membership (50% discount available) for all events plus Digital Library 250+ videos, mentoring, hands-on workshops and more...

35 min Visiontyping- Prototyping Future Scenari...

60 min Designing from Values, Driving with Visi...

57 min Why Contextual Inquiry? Contextual inqui...

Beyond Empathy: Designing with Lived Experience 3917 SEPTEMBER 26th  9:00AM PDT; 12:00PM EDT; 17:00PM BST (London); 18:00PM CET 22:30 PM IST 60 minutes

Designing with Lived Experience

Two problems with how products are built:

First, most product teams start with assumptions. We segment audiences, write personas, and sketch journeys, often looking at users’ world from a narrow ‘use case’ lens. Agile zooms us even closer: ‘As a user, I want to X, so I can Y”. In working in this way, we don’t get the opportunity to fully appreciate the underlying lived experience that compels users in one direction or another. Lived experience can help avoid the risk that users feel you got it wrong. It can illuminate your team on unappreciated bias, harm, power imbalances and more.

Second, when we do user research, we explore a problem space with empathy (Rethinking Empathy masterclass), extracting ‘user needs’ and capturing user requirements. Too often, we listen to people’s stories but still create solutions based on our own assumptions, priorities, or institutional logic. We “consult” with lived experience but don’t let it guide how solutions are defined or decisions are made.

The result? Services that may be functional but feel not quite right, extractive, or even harmful.

If we want services, products, or systems that truly work, we need to move beyond collecting lived experience as data. We need to design with lived experience as a partner in solutioning and co-creation.

About this Masterclass

A lived experience approach flips the script. Instead of beginning with what we think people need, we start where they actually are. We listen to their stories, trace their relationships, and understand the cultural forces at play. This isn’t just about empathy. It’s about shifting power.

In this Masterclass, Frank Spillers, will explore how lived experience can change how you approach the designing of products and services. He’ll show how beyond a data point, lived experience can replace classic approaches to Human Centered Design with a focus on appreciating the culture, identity, or relationships that shape someone’s daily experience.

Agenda- Beyond Empathy: Designing with Lived Experience Masterclass

• Lived Experience- Why Listening is not enough
• Identifying your Lived Experience and your user’s Lived Experience
• How to move your Human Centered Design approach to a more relational framework where stress cases and trauma-informed become default
• Q&A

About Monthly MasterClasses:

These monthly meet-ups are topic-driven live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions. Monthly MasterClasses are included as part of your membership. They allow a deep dive into important UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank’s 25 years in the field. How to access this masterclass...

• Open Circle: FREE (Get it FREE>> Join Open Circle)
• Inner Circle: Included in your $99 a month Inner Circle membership (50% discount available) for all events plus Digital Library 250+ videos, mentoring, hands-on workshops and more...

1 hr 20 min   Reading Circle- Design for R...

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