Despite years of effort mainstreaming Responsible Digital Development thinking and Human Centred Design into international development lifecycles, too many AI powered interventions are being designed and released without returning to first principles: understanding users and their context of use, co-designing, prototyping and testing in communities, establishing meaningful feedback loops and ongoing participation mechanisms.

The MERL Tech Initiative is excited to address that gap with the launch of a new Learning Group. Co-led by Isabelle Amazon-Brown, Sofie Meyer, and Sara Chamberlain, this learning group will focus on the practical, hands-on aspects of designing AI-powered tools for development and humanitarian contexts.

Whilst many current efforts touch on factors that feed into the design of AI-powered tools, we don’t currently have a dedicated space for design professionals directly involved in the day-to-day work of shaping these tools in the social sector. This learning group aims to fill that gap by creating a forum to share insights, learn from each other’s experiences, and collectively define what inclusive, human-centered AI design looks like in practice.

This learning group will aim to meet quarterly and provide opportunities for practitioners with hands-on experience to:

1. Share insights into who is and isn’t using AI tools and why (trust, awareness, device ownership, data affordability, digital competency, costs, liability, and more).
2. Discuss common usage patterns to help inform more intelligent design (onboarding behaviors, informed consent, frequency and duration of use, pain points, guardrails, human-in-the-loop considerations).
3. Share and critique emerging design and prompting conventions, with emphasis on data privacy, safety, inclusion, accessibility, and usability.
4. Document challenges and promising examples of responsible, human-centered design practices.
5. Increase awareness of safety risks and mitigation strategies (red-teaming, retrieval) We also want to provide designers and others with the opportunity to talk openly about how AI is changing our profession and day to day tasks – for better and worse.

Our inaugural meeting is taking place on March 12, 2026, at 10am ET, 2pm GMT, 3pm CET.

To encourage open and honest discussion about what’s working and what’s not, we expect this session to follow Chatham House Rule.