About

Richmond Wong is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Media, and Communication. He directs the Creating Ethics Infrastructures Lab where his research seeks to create social, cultural, and organizational environments that can support technologists and designers in ethical decisionmaking. This includes creating design approaches that propose alternate ways to consider human values, supporting worker and community-led actions, improving organizational ethics review practices, and understanding the role of law and policy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Engineering ethics
• Epistemology
• Political Science
• Engineering
• Surgery
• Cardiology
• Medicine
• Human–computer interaction
• Internal medicine
• Management science
• Environmental ethics
• Business

Selected publications

• Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in context. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We propose designing for inter-community governance: mechanisms that support relationships between communities toward coordinating on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas discussed in workshops. These ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources and tools that highlight three key principles for design: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how workshop ideas might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing more broadly.

  PublisherDOI

• The Values of Value in AI Adoption: Rethinking Efficiency in UX Designers' Workplaces

  Open MIND · 2026-03-06

  preprintSenior author

  Although organizations increasingly position AI adoption as a pathway to competitiveness and innovation, organizations' perspectives on productivity and efficiency often clash with workers' perspectives on AI's economic and social value. Through design workshops with 15 UX designers, we examine how AI adoption unfolds across individual, team, and organizational scales. At the individual level, designers weighed efficiency, skill development, and professional worth. At the team level, they negotiated collaboration, responsibility, and rigor. At the organizational level, adoption was shaped by compliance requirements and organizational norms. Across these scales, discourses of efficiency carried social and ethical dimensions of responsibility, trust, and autonomy. We view adoption as a site where roles, relationships, and power are reconfigured. We argue that AI adoption should be understood as a process of negotiating values, and call for future work examining how AI systems redistribute responsibility among team members, while understanding how such shifts could strengthen worker agency.

  DOI

• Beyond Claiming Sovereign AI: Motivations, Challenges, and Contradictions in Developing and Deploying Local Foundation Models in South Korea

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Tooling Justice: Articulating Equity Work Through Design Toolkits

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Design equity toolkits are increasingly being invoked to address the ethical and political consequences of technology design, yet they are criticized for being either too generic or too narrow to address the complex realities of equity in design. To examine the intended purpose of these toolkits from creators’ perspectives and explore how designers envision using them in practice, we conducted a two-phase study: interviews with toolkit creators and a walkthrough demonstration workshop with early-career UX designers. Our findings highlight divergent values around toolkit functionality: while creators emphasize flexibility and reflection, early-career designers express a need for actionable pathways to help mediate design equity work within corporate hierarchies. We show how toolkits act as supports for articulation work in design equity, their role as boundary objects for values translation, and conclude by framing how design equity toolkits can be re-conceptualized as legitimacy-building artefacts with capacites to help early-designers advocate for more equitable futures.

  PublisherDOI

• Reflections Towards an Ecology of Internet Connectivity: Three Speculative Scenarios Involving Foot Pedals

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  HCI’s dominant assumptions of always-on and relatively ubiquitous internet connectivity often overlook other potential configurations of connectivity, which may embody alternative social values and politics, or promote alternative types of technology practices. Building on research exploring alternate configurations of connectivity, we develop and present three speculative scenarios in a North American context that configure internet connectivity differently than these dominant assumptions. Each scenario features a "foot pedal" that mediates internet connectivity. Through the scenarios, we conceptualize connectivity as a multi-dimensional ecology. The scenarios explore how alternative configurations of connectivity implicate concerns related to dimensions of: social norms and rituals; maintenance, repair, and governance; interests and decision-making beyond individual choice; and broader inequalities and systems of power. These suggest possible alternative ends and goals of internet connectivity. Finally, we offer reflections from our experience developing these scenarios for HCI scholars working with speculative practices.

  PublisherDOI

• The Quality of Speculation: Common Ground for Speculative Design in Human-Computer Interaction?

  2026-04-13

  article

  Speculative design is increasingly being used in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to explore the not-yet. Nonetheless, it remains methodologically vague and is often contested. Especially, what counts as good speculation, and how its quality can be conceptualized, is an ongoing discussion. This workshop brings together researchers, designers, and practitioners to collectively explore questions of quality in speculative design. Building on a recently published descriptive taxonomy of quality, the workshop offers this framework as an initial common ground for shared reflection and critique. Participants will analyze speculative designs and engage in critical discussion to examine how quality is constructed and negotiated across practices and contexts. By challenging the taxonomy's applicability and limits, the workshop will explore diverse perspectives on what constitutes quality. Insights from the workshop will inform refinements to the taxonomy, deepen the conceptualization of quality in speculative design, and strengthen its legitimacy as a research practice.

  PublisherDOI

• The Values of Value in AI Adoption: Rethinking Efficiency in UX Designers' Workplaces

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Although organizations increasingly position AI adoption as a pathway to competitiveness and innovation, organizations’ perspectives on productivity and efficiency often clash with workers’ perspectives on AI’s economic and social value. Through design workshops with 15 UX designers, we examine how AI adoption unfolds across individual, team, and organizational scales. At the individual level, designers weighed efficiency, skill development, and professional worth. At the team level, they negotiated collaboration, responsibility, and rigor. At the organizational level, adoption was shaped by compliance requirements and organizational norms. Across these scales, discourses of efficiency carried social and ethical dimensions of responsibility, trust, and autonomy. We view adoption as a site where roles, relationships, and power are reconfigured. We argue that AI adoption should be understood as a process of negotiating values, and call for future work examining how AI systems redistribute responsibility among team members, while understanding how such shifts could strengthen worker agency.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding Socio-technical Factors Configuring AI Non-Use in UX Work Practices

  2025-04-24 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Towards Creating Infrastructures for Values and Ethics Work in the Production of Software Technologies

  2025-07-23 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Recognizing how technical systems can embody social values or cause harms, human-computer interaction (HCI) research often approaches addressing values and ethics in design by creating tools to help tech workers integrate social values into the design of products. While useful, these approaches usually do not consider the politics embedded in the broader processes, organizations, social systems, and governance structures that affect the types of actions that tech workers can take to address values and ethics. This paper argues that creating infrastructures to support values and ethics work, rather than tools, is an approach that takes these broader processes into account and opens them up for (re)design. Drawing on prior research conceptualizing infrastructures from science \& technology studies and media studies, this paper outlines conceptual insights from infrastructures studies that open up new tactics for HCI researchers and designers seeking to support values and ethics in design.

  PublisherDOI

• "I see it, I scroll past it.": Exploring Perceptions of Social Media Political Discourse Among Gen Z Young Adult Women In The U.S.

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-05-02 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Social media platforms have been widely perceived as centers of political discourse, and have been shown to facilitate political participation among young adults (18-26 years). However, as the effects of online political discourse and behaviors have become pervasive offline, significantly affecting global political processes such as deterring women from public political office and influencing election outcomes, it raises questions regarding how young adult users engage in these online political spaces of discourse. In this paper, we focus on the perceptions and forms of engagement of Gen Z social media users, specifically those of Gen Z young adult women. In this paper we broadly ask, how do voting-age Generation (Gen) Z young adult women perceive spaces of political discourse on social media, and do these perceptions affect how they choose to engage in them? To explore this question, we conducted 17 interviews with voting-age Gen Z women across the United States. We found that our participants were largely critical of social media as spaces of political discourse. They were skeptical of the credibility of the political information shared on social media, questioned the usefulness of sharing political information through social media, and felt that social media was not conducive to having productive political discussions. We find that participant perceptions of social media political discourse led to them limiting their online engagement or disengaging entirely from online public political spaces, but expanding their offline private political engagement through in-person discussion. Our findings indicate that our participants were not politically disinterested, but rather did not partake in public forms of social media political engagement, leading us to question and reconsider widespread interpretations of 'political participation' that center and emphasize public forms of action and expression. Drawing on our findings, we propose that the practice of 'disengagement' from public spaces of online political discourse should be considered a dimension of political engagement and not separate from it. In proposing this, we also broadly question the efficacy of social media as a forum to promote and facilitate political discourse.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nick Merrill

  University of California, Berkeley

  11 shared

• Deirdre K. Mulligan

  10 shared

• James Pierce

  University of Washington

  8 shared

• John Chuang

  University of California, Berkeley

  6 shared

• Nitin Kohli

  5 shared

• Michael Madaio

  4 shared

• Sarah Fox

  4 shared

• Joshua A. Kroll

  4 shared

Labs

• Creating Ethics Infrastructures LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., School of Information

  University of California Berkeley

• Other

  UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity

• B.S., Information Science

  Cornell University

• B.A., Science & Technology Studies

  Cornell University

Awards & honors

• Honorable Mention award at DIS 2021
• Best Paper Award at CSCW 2018
• Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2019
• Best Paper Award at CSCW 2018