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A Mission-Oriented Approach: Designing for Societal Resilience
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A Mission-Oriented Approach: Designing for Societal Resilience

We define resilience as the capacity to anticipate, absorb, and adapt to disruption.

Microsoft, 2021


Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Analytical
  • Visionary
  • Engaging

Recommendation

Microsoft’s new online tech hub describes its latest insights about new technology breakthroughs, including “reinforcement learning,” smart devices and advice for using technology for social benefits. One section of the hub focuses on designing businesses and communities to achieve better societal resilience, and how to tackle system vulnerability’s causes and results. Among the equation’s viable parts are COVID-19 and human trafficking. 

Summary

Innovation hinges on our ability to see the world differently.

Global challenges keep showing us how fragile our world is. To prevent crises arising from global challenges, people must learn to look at the world differently and quickly adapt to changing environments.

Solutions that are adaptive, inclusive and facilitate decision-making require people to overcome barriers and embrace the contributions of diverse minds.

Technology can provide tools that are “designed for the speed of a crisis and the context of a crisis zone.”

Technology that is capable of “societal scale problem-solving” needs to be designed differently from existing technology. Rather than being efficient, it must gain the capacity to be responsive, relevant and scale to a range of typical challenges that different types of crises share.

Such technology uses AI to identify patterns in real-world data and finds diverse applications including the fight against digital crimes, corruption, theft and human trafficking.

A resilient society acknowledges and attacks systemic issues that promote human trafficking.

In 2018, Microsoft jointly founded the Tech Against Trafficking...

About the Author

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation that produces computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services.