A Mission-Oriented Approach: Designing for Societal Resilience

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...