Integrating Ethnofuturism and AI: A Framework for Sustainable Communication Design

Abstract

AI is on the rise in the field of Visual communication and branding, translation, Content creation, Interaction design and cultural interpreters. Whilst symbols might have the potential to provide creative opportunities, an AI only approach can result in out-of-community symbols being given agency, stereotypes being created, source of the training material being erased, digital production becoming more environmentally costly and even lying about local authorship. When thinking about culture as ‘Ethnofuturism' as a ‘living source' of imagining the future, as opposed to a typological culture in terms of 'retrieved' themes from a past. The concept of this mini project is to be visionary and to create an Ethnofuturist AI Framework for Sustainable communication Design (EFA-SCD). It's a combination of community leadership, a multitude of other concepts of community futures, cultural stewardship, data stewardship, and some limited co-creations with humans and AI, along with communication, accessibility and environment-consciousness. It is made up of 6-stages, which include: Relate - Govern - Curate - Co-generate - Validate and Return. A decision gate will be provided at the end of each stage that will stop the work of this project, if the necessary approvals and/or traceability/community review is not obtained. The field-based scores are not explored as simulated evidence for a multilingual climate-resilience campaign while examples of the use of this framework are provided in a scenario-based pilot. The strength of the governed workflow not only for the community to approve, but also for cultural authenticity, language accuracy, for accessibility and transparency and for environment - and for efficient production workflows, with AI as an added bonus for ideation, adaptation and production. This aspect is highlighted as a last phase of this project, when these rights become explicit and design decisions are subject to scrutiny and held accountable, in order to restore the right and control of the communication to the culture itself of which it is significant and to which it belongs in Ethnofuturism Challenge - Artificial Intelligence in Sustainable Communication Design.