Rafael A. Calvo

Rafael A. Calvo is a researcher and engineer whose work investigates how technology can be designed to support human wellbeing rather than merely capture attention or optimize behavioral metrics. He is Professor of Engineering Design at Imperial College London's Dyson School of Design Engineering, where he leads research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and applied ethics. He previously held a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council and was Director of the Software Engineering Group at the University of Sydney.

Calvo earned his PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Rosario in Argentina and has held research positions at MIT, the University of Sydney, and Imperial College. His research has been funded by the Australian Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the European Union, among other bodies. He has supervised dozens of PhD students working on the design of educational technology, mental health tools, and interfaces that support psychological wellbeing.

His 2014 book Positive Computing: Technology for Wellbeing and Human Potential, co-authored with Dorian Peters, is the foundational text in the field that bears its name. The book draws on three decades of psychological research, particularly from positive psychology and self-determination theory, to argue that interactive technology should be designed to support core dimensions of human flourishing: autonomy, competence, relatedness, empathy, compassion, and engagement. Its target audience is the engineers and designers who build the systems most people interact with every day.

His more recent work investigates the application of these design principles to AI systems specifically. He has co-led research on designing AI to support, rather than displace, human autonomy and wellbeing, and has written on the responsibilities of AI developers in creative, educational, and clinical contexts. He served as a Working Group Co-chair on the IEEE's Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, contributing to international technical standards on the design of AI for human wellbeing.

Rafael A. Calvo's work grounds Individuals First. The treatise cites Positive Computing for the argument that technology should not just be functional but should "contribute positively to our psychological state," that systems should enhance human capability, not diminish it for the sake of an optimized metric.

The principle's commitment to individual agency above efficiency, profit, or convenience has direct technical lineage in Calvo's research. He and Peters defined what it means, concretely, for design to support autonomy, competence, and relatedness as engineering requirements rather than as soft aspirations. Applied to AI: the principle insists that systems be evaluated on their contribution to human flourishing, not on their performance against the narrow behavioral metrics that are easy to measure. Calvo's body of work is the most thoroughly developed framework available for what that evaluation looks like in practice.