African Cosmology and the Design of Human-centered Interactive Systems in the Age of AI

The rise of AI has led to new interactive systems that no longer merely execute commands, but anticipate needs, adapt in real time, generate new knowledge artifacts, and increasingly behave like human collaborative partners.  The design of these systems presents significant challenges for the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), ranging from privacy concerns and ethical considerations in generative AI, to problems of intent specification in conversational interactions, the challenge of context engineering in software design, and issues of hallucination and trustworthiness through explainable and transparent AI systems.

In this talk, I argue that addressing some of these challenges would require us – as HCI professionals, researchers, technology designers, software developers and academics – to escape the confines of our conventional disciplines and belief systems, to embrace the possibilities in multidisciplinary and multicultural insights, and to explore pluriversal knowledge systems. Using examples from Igbo spirituality and worldviews, I propose African cosmology as one such source that the HCI community can go to in the quest for the design of human-centered AI futures. African cosmology is a diverse and very rich source of knowledge that has provided a basis for how Africans, since ancient times, have sought the meaning of life and achieved harmony with nature. Although this rich cosmological heritage has been little known outside of the continent, there has been growing interest by both African and non-African researchers and scholars to explore this cosmological world of the traditional African. The talk will present African HCI professionals with an alternative framework to boost their creative capacities as technology researchers and designers. It posits that to retain global relevance and contribute to building more innovative products and technologies for the AI age, Africa must embrace and extend the irrational core of science by digging deep into its own wealth of knowledge.

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