The diversity dividend - on building products for refugees
Refugees are the most diverse group there is. Designing for them, Manuela Verduci found, produces better products for everyone.
A note from the editor
This is ΦAI’s first interview, and the beginning of a new format.
Until now, this publication has asked its questions in essay form: what AI does to how we think, learn, remember, relate. Essays are one way of answering. One person exploring and sharing their view.
But some people prefer to answer by building. A company, a product, an institution. Professionally, I come from the building world. And even though I am convinced that holding space for critique — for understanding — is much needed, I sometimes feel the itch to do something with that understanding. Entrepreneurship can be as serious a response to these questions as scholarship.
So, from time to time, ΦAI will hand the page to the builders. Manuela Verduci — philosopher, and CEO of Kiron Digital Learning Solutions — is the right person to open the series.
Enjoy!
— Karin
Manuela Verduci runs Kiron Digital Learning Solutions, a Berlin-based company building inclusive ed-tech for marginalized learners and the European employers who need them. A philosopher by training, she sees entrepreneurship as a place to challenge premises rather than just optimize what already exists. We spoke about why learning needs friction, why designing for refugees produces better products for everyone, and what AI is still missing in education. This conversation followed AI, Memory and Migration, a panel and interactive workshop we co-hosted in Berlin that asked whose story survives the algorithm.
Karin Garcia: You call yourself a philosopher, and you’ve said that philosophy gave you skills that proved very valuable in your business life. What are those skills, and how did engagement with philosophy build them?
Manuela Verduci: Thank you for the question. I think the most valuable thing is the distinction between innovation and improvement. A lot of entrepreneurial work, especially in the social impact space, sells itself as innovation when it’s really just improvement. Improvement doesn’t challenge the premises of what you’re doing if you only optimize what already exists. Taking something and making it better, faster is a legitimate way to do entrepreneurship.
But there’s another way, which I think is much more impactful, and that’s really doing innovation. For me, innovation means challenging the premises of how we live together. Not taking for granted that we’ll do things this way forever, but asking what we can change in the underlying assumptions to transform society in a different way.
And that, to come back to your question, is what philosophy trains you to do. To move up to the meta level and not to take for granted what you have, but to ask the foundational questions: What does it mean to have a good life? What does it mean to think? What does it mean to live in community? I do believe entrepreneurs should be more familiar with this way of thinking if they really want to innovate.
Karin Garcia: So you see challenging premises as necessary in how you build products. How do you apply that?
Manuela Verduci: Yes. Not always, obviously, depending on your goal. But I’m a social entrepreneur, and for me the goal is not to keep the premises of society as they are. I want to instigate change. I want to read deeply into the structures that create what we call injustice, inequality, or exclusion. My work is oriented towards that. And only when I landed my current mission of rethinking education for marginalized groups I realized how important it is to be able to challenge the premises of what we do.
Karin Garcia: That brings me to the next point. Can you briefly introduce Kiron Digital? What are your products, and who do you serve?
Manuela Verduci: We were born as an NGO in 2015. The goal was to make education accessible to refugees worldwide. The Syrian war was in an acute phase and many young and talented people were coming to Berlin looking for a way to restart their lives after fleeing war. And we noticed how high the barriers were just to get to the point where you could start learning. Many of these people were already qualified, but had no way to have their qualifications recognized. They had to start a new path of upskilling. And without papers it’s hard to even exist in Germany, as you may know. So we created a digital space where they could get immediate access to high-quality education that was also recognized by the institutions around them, so they could just get started with their lives.
That’s the first chapter of our story. The second is more entrepreneurial: at some point we realized we couldn’t rely only on politics for funding. The discourse around migration was getting more difficult, and we needed to become sustainable in our impact. So we founded a company - Kiron Digital - to distribute the technology we’d built for our students to other entities working in education and impact. It’s an educational technology designed to be engaging, participative, and inclusive.
It turns out everyone needs that. Especially in Europe right now, where the labor shortage is affecting much of the economy. One of the main barriers is creating a sense of belonging for the people who come to Germany to help solve that challenge. Because you might not know this but Germany is one of the worst countries in Europe at retaining migrants. People do come but then they end up leaving because of how difficult it is for people to feel welcome here. With this technology, we believe we can help employers and educational institutions create the sense of belonging that ultimately translates into economic success.
Karin Garcia: I want to connect to a point you made. In a talk we gave together, you said refugees are the most diverse group there is. How do you design for such a group? How does that diversity show up in the products you build?
Manuela Verduci: It happened a little by accident at the beginning. We were designing for our target group and it just happens to be the most diverse target group there is. “Refugee” doesn’t really mean anything; it’s just a label. The people behind that label have wildly different backgrounds: age, gender, social status, access to education, language. Everything is different.
So when we sat down to do user-centered design, we had to ask: what would an inclusive learning environment look like for such a diverse group? We ended up creating a technology that really fosters participation, that makes people feel seen, that represents very different ways of learning, alone or in community, across very different cultural backgrounds. And we noticed now that everyone benefits from that. Even people who are not newcomers feel more seen and more motivated to participate, and to build community around learning.
Karin Garcia: You mentioned the underlying principle is user-centered design. Can you share the principles of that framework and how to start applying them?
Manuela Verduci: You start by analyzing who you’re designing for. What are this person’s needs? A very basic example: if you’re designing for someone learning from a refugee camp, one question is whether they can access the internet 24 hours a day. Probably not. So, for example, you need a function that lets them download content when they have access (because maybe they will walk three miles to a wifi station to get access to it) and then learn at their own pace once they’re back.
That’s one of the most basic examples. But then there are much more interesting questions, like language, like learning type: how do we keep a person of this age, at this career stage, with this set of interests, engaged? What dramaturgy do we build around the learning experience? In the same way you might design a series, what kind of engagement can you generate that keeps people motivated, especially when they have a lot of other challenges to deal with?
You may need a moment of activation at the beginning, then time to focus and read, then exchange with someone to test whether you got it right, then a moment of reflection to really solidify it. That’s just one example of a learning arc. Thinking about that experience and testing it together with the learners, that’s user-centered design.
Karin Garcia: And where and how do you speak with your users?
Manuela Verduci: That was a decisive moment. At the beginning, we were interviewing and testing a lot with students. But a huge quality jump happened when we started working with people who had that experience themselves.
Karin Garcia: As employees?
Manuela Verduci: Exactly. We started actively co-creating and involving people with migration histories or histories of fleeing conflict in our work, having them in the design process directly. That made a huge difference.
Karin Garcia: You speak very highly of your product. How do you implement the feedback loop with your users? How do you know what to adapt?
Manuela Verduci: We do this continuously. It’s iterative. And the audience is even broader now, because with the company we’ve founded, we’re addressing many more different target groups. We work with social enterprises that have education at the core of their vision, and we learn from their experience. That multiplies the field of learning for us.
For example, we work with a client who bring diverse learning into schools for kids with special talents, or who are neurodivergent, or artistically inclined; kids who don’t find enough stimuli for developing their talents in regular school. One organization, Digitale Drehtür, has been very inspiring to work with. They’re really about bringing diversity into the learning experience: everyone can experiment with who they are and develop a part of themselves that maybe didn’t get a chance to shine in regular education. It’s a beautiful way to enrich school for German kids.
We also work with organizations that offer mentorship to disadvantaged groups, and with one that trains educators in contemporary pedagogies. All of that gets fed back to our engineering team, who then design to meet the specific needs and open up new paths for learning.
Karin Garcia: I read something recently that connects very well to what you’re saying. When people think of designing products with diversity in mind, they often think of it as “we need to change something for this group”. They think of it like something additional, an extra effort. But if you look at features that exist today and were implemented because of diversity, you could say they benefit everyone. Captions on Instagram, for example, were invented for hearing-impaired people who couldn’t hear videos. Now everyone uses them to watch on trains in public, anywhere you can’t have sound. The same with wheelchair ramps, which also benefit parents with strollers or people riding bikes. Everyone in society benefits once these features are in place. Your example connects to that: all students benefit from these learnings, not only people with migration experience.
Manuela Verduci: Absolutely true. I like what you said, because diversity is going through an unfortunate moment right now, its adverse times. It’s exactly that: people perceive it as giving up something, instead of as an expansion of possibility, for everyone.
I think this is especially true for the future of work. In Europe it’s very palpable that we’re experiencing a crisis of work. People don’t feel a sense of belonging or meaning in what they do, and they’re checked out, silent quitting is a huge problem across the economic landscape.
What people miss about diversity is that it’s primarily about unleashing, for everyone, the possibility to bring yourself into what you do. Truly catering for diversity means that you, whoever you are, even if you were born here, will get the space to bring your specific talent, your specific passion, the thing you do best, into what you do. That creates connection and a sense of belonging and purpose. It will be decisive for mental health, and for how people feel about their work and the impact they generate. Ultimately, it produces people who are committed and find meaning, instead of people who are checked out and depressed.
Karin Garcia: A takeaway of this conversation could be that when we think about diversity, we don’t need the framing of “we’re doing something special for them.” It’s for all of us. We’ll all benefit from it, even if we don’t know exactly how yet. Take the Instagram captions again, go to any train, everyone is using a feature that was built for hearing-impaired people.
Alright, let’s move to the juicy part. How are you leveraging AI in particular to serve your customer base?
Manuela Verduci: We’re in the process of learning a lot from the needs of every target group we serve. Our policy has been not to rush implementation just for the sake of having an AI stamp. We’re learning, studying, and feeling that we need to create a new pedagogy that doesn’t yet exist.
I’ve seen this before. There was a moment, maybe fifteen years ago, when MOOCs, massive open online courses, became the big digitalization wave for education. All of a sudden, universities were putting what they had out there digitally, and the first thing they did was apply the logic of an offline classroom to an online one. That was a disaster. The most boring, disengaging, shallow and pedagogically ineffective strategy. If you remember those painful hours of a professor in the distance talking to 300 people with no participation, it was really not ideal.
I think a similar phenomenon is happening with AI. People assume they can apply the pedagogical principles they know about learning digitally to this new technology. We need to make space to think first. Don’t get me wrong we should also experiment, get our hands dirty, play with this. But I haven’t seen anything truly impressive or revolutionary in AI pedagogy yet. I’m wishing for creative energy that thinks outside the box: what kind of approach can we develop that actually helps people learn better?
This requires philosophical thinking again. What is the outcome we want? What kind of people do we want to form? What kind of society do we want to live in? These fundamental questions are connected to what looks like a technical, specific problem but it really goes up to: what kind of humans do we want to be? And how do we foster them.
Karin Garcia: You said you’re learning a lot and not rushing to implement yet. Can you share some of those learnings? Potentially things you already see, or things where you say, okay, we need to take this into account for whatever we do next?
Manuela Verduci: Many. But the central one, the thing I think is clear and that we have to tackle now, Is that learning is a process that requires a certain level of fatigue. It’s friction, really. Learning is a transformative process, and that happens through some level of challenge to overcome. The output of learning is not knowing a piece of information. To know a notion isn’t a meaningful thing anymore. We can all access all the notions in the world; we can look up anything.
The important thing is that through the process of reading a book or engaging with a difficult topic, you rewire your brain. You’re training your brain muscles to see things from a perspective that isn’t natural to you. You’re forcing yourself to make new connections. It’s like going to the gym. It takes time, and the fatigue is part of it. It cannot be eliminated. If you don’t want to be transformed, if you just want a Wikipedia page kind of human, then fine. But what we want to do with learning is transform people. That’s the beauty of the process. And for it to be transformative, it needs to involve some friction. Designing for that friction is a very philosophical question.
Karin Garcia: What you’re saying is striking, because sadly we see in schools and universities people using AI exactly to remove the friction in order to produce an output that could be a test, a paper, an essay. And the current collective reaction, out of not having anything better, is to ban AI from the classroom. To forbid things. But that’s not going to be a solution, because these tools aren’t going anywhere. What you’re pointing at, I think, is that we need to find a way to use AI not as we used a computer or a whiteboard before, but in a different way, one suited to this new era, so that it supports the learning process rather than short-circuiting it.
Manuela Verduci: There are plenty of things where I would love to eliminate friction. If we can automate and make everyone’s life easier in many ways, I’m not against that. In fact, even more so, because that creates more space for us to invest our energy in the right kind of friction. To train our brains in the directions we’d like to grow into. To be less enslaved by the everyday friction that isn’t really transformative, where automation actually makes sense.
Karin Garcia: I love how you’re framing friction as something you design for. Friction as something that might be desirable. We’re often conditioned to believe friction is something to remove. Even in the context of diversity, friction often pairs with disability: improving accessibility is described as removing friction. But here, in this context, you want to keep it for this particular outcome.
Manuela Verduci: Socrates was not very loved by his fellow citizens precisely because he was creating friction all the time. If you wanted to have a conversation about a glass, he’d force you to first think: what is the meaning of this conversation? Why do we need a glass? Is this really about the glass? It was very annoying.
Karin Garcia: I get it. We don’t need friction at every moment.
Manuela Verduci: That’s a good point. The philosophical mindset is exhausting if it’s the only one we have. We need to take things for granted most of the time. But if you’re an entrepreneur and you want to create impact and change, how would you do that without stepping into questioning?
Karin Garcia: What’s one thing you could share that would contribute something new to the conversation around refugees, migration, integration, and how AI will change their experiences, and how broader society perceives them?
Manuela Verduci: This shift is partially already happening in people’s perception. It’s because we realize there is a huge labor shortage in Germany that has to be addressed seriously.
What people haven’t done yet is the connection between addressing labor shortage and fostering good and inclusive ways to welcome people into our country and democracy. That link is becoming very evident now, because the labor shortage is starting to affect people’s access to their own rights. Something Germans take for granted, that you go to the hospital and you’ll be taken care of, in a developed, rich, democratic country like Germany, is now very fragile because of the labor shortage. So the connection between responding to this labor crisis and the ability of Germany to continuing to deliver on the level of comfort and human rights it has reached, is becoming clear.
I think AI is going to contribute hugely at every level of optimizing bureaucratic processes, something very obvious that we discussed at our event together. But, if you allow me, that’s just the first level of implementation, not innovation. It’s speeding up processes that already exist.
What I’d love to see is AI becoming a resonance room for a different way to understand and build narratives, and for people to reflect on how artificially those narratives are built. The experiment we did with different LLMs at our event, feeding migration narratives through differently-tuned prompts to see what they added or erased, was a beautiful way to show that narratives are not natural; they are artificially constructed. AI is a great mirror for that. A mirror for all of us to reflect on how we build narratives around migration, around democracy, and to start stepping in a little more as authors of those narratives.
Karin Garcia: What’s the most counterintuitive lesson you’ve learned about building products in this space, for this audience, something that goes against common wisdom?
Manuela Verduci: You really have to practice the difference between asking for a solution and understanding a problem. That’s a big lesson in product building for me. In the first hour, we all rush to cater to a requested solution. “Oh, there’s something missing, we need a button here to click, this will be better!”
You have to sit with people and dismantle their answers first. Go back to: what is the need that isn’t being met? Get there first, and then maybe there are ten different possible solutions to the same need. Going back to the question gives you much more freedom to innovate in the product. It pulls you out of the automated reflex of fixing things quickly, and it asks you to rethink: what is the question behind that, and how are the many ways we could solve this need different from each other? That’s a very creative space.
Karin Garcia: Which goes back to user-centered design.
Manuela Verduci: But also not just catering to the needs the user expresses literally. Rather to really question where the need comes from, and what kind of creative environment we can build to solve it, even if the solution doesn’t look identical to the original request.
Karin Garcia: Is there anything else you’d like to share, anything I haven’t asked that’s close to your heart?
Manuela Verduci: Yes. Allow me to take inspiration from a conversation you and I had earlier today, about critical thinking being a great tool for identifying problems and understanding what’s wrong in the world. But it’s just one of the tools we need. The goal is not to be cornered into passivity by the amount of critical things we can observe right now, especially in the evolution of AI. The other side of that is building things, participating in the design of new products, stepping in as actors.
The work you’re doing with Phi/AI, for example, is extremely inspiring to many people because it shows you can understand the problem without being paralyzed by it, and that there are other possibilities to build this tool differently, to design it for our values. The only way this will happen is by encouraging people to step up and not leave it in the hands of a very small circle. So thank you for that work.
Karin Garcia: Thank you, Manuela, for sharing, and for your time today.
About Manuela Verduci
Manuela Verduci is the CEO of Kiron Digital Learning Solutions, whose mission is to provide access to education for refugees and underserved communities worldwide while offering inclusive ed-tech solutions to companies and institutions across Europe. She also leads one of Germany’s most successful integration programs, reshaping inclusion efforts across healthcare, the green transition, and education. Manuela is a published author of several works in Philosophy, Migration, and Diversity, and teaches Ethics and Philosophy of Technology to international tech entrepreneurs.
About Karin Garcia
Karin Garcia is the founding editor of ΦAI, an online magazine at the intersection of the humanities and technology, operated as a writers’ collective. Through writing, panels, and convenings, ΦAI practices slow, human-first inquiry into what AI means for real lives, resisting both hype and panic in equal measure.