Problem Description
Digital Human Twins increasingly model the living body in virtual–physical blended environments—capturing behavior, goals, values, and wellbeing, but also raising urgent social questions about identity, selfhood, liveness/presence, and who controls our data futures. Public concern is growing around the invisible collection of biometric and psychophysiological data by corporations and governments, and around the risks of surveillance, bias, manipulation, and exclusion. Inspired by Ghislaine Boddington’s “AI Hybrid BioTwin”, the guided project treats twins as socio-technical systems that shape trust, agency, belonging, and everyday life—not just technical performance.
Project Definition
Students design and prototype a Digital Human Twin concept for a chosen domain (e.g., education, work, health, civic services, smart homes, or XR collaboration). The project is explicitly socio-technical: students treat the twin not only as a system, but as a participant in social situations. Each project will:
- Define stakeholders, power dynamics, and value conflicts (who benefits, who is at risk, what “good” means).
- Design interactions that support agency, consent, and transparency (user control, understandable explanations, boundaries).
- Model situated context (place, activity, social setting) and—where relevant—basic affective/social cues.
- Integrate various design methods (e.g. interviews, scenario walk-throughs, participatory design,personas, thought experiments) and optionally XR-based studies to explore trust, bias, collaboration, and group decision-making.
- Prototypes can be low- to mid-fidelity (service blueprint + interactive mockups) or more technical (simulation/XR), depending on student background.
Learning Outcome
Students will be able to:
- Frame Digital Human Twins as social actors and analyze implications for trust, identity, and power.
- Apply design methods across phases, including participatory and value-sensitive approaches (research → requirements → prototyping → evaluation).
- Create and justify a prototype that embeds user control, consent, and explainability.
- Identify and mitigate socio-ethical risks (bias, exclusion, surveillance creep, manipulation, dependency).
- Design evaluations that measure social outcomes (e.g., trust, perceived fairness, agency, collaboration quality) alongside usability.
- Communicate results clearly in a project report/presentation, linking design decisions to social evidence and values.
Participation Requirements
Students should have an interest in socio-technical questions around identity, trust, privacy, bias, and wellbeing. They are expected to work in small teams, engage with research literature, and contribute to a project workflow (empathize → define → ideate → prototype→test). Basic skills in reading and synthesizing academic texts, applying design methods and producing a prototype (e.g., Figma, interactive mockups, video prototype, or simple simulation) are required; advanced technical skills (coding/XR) are helpful.
External Partner
Potential industrial partner: Mimicminds
Contact person: Violeta Vasileva via@mimicproductions.com