  Diversity-aware platform design is a paradigm that responds to the ethical
challenges of existing social media platforms. Available platforms have been
criticized for minimizing users' autonomy, marginalizing minorities, and
exploiting users' data for profit maximization. This paper presents a design
solution that centers the well-being of users. It presents the theory and
practice of designing a diversity-aware platform for social relations. In this
approach, the diversity of users is leveraged in a way that allows like-minded
individuals to pursue similar interests or diverse individuals to complement
each other in a complex activity. The end users of the envisioned platform are
students, who participate in the design process. Diversity-aware platform
design involves numerous steps, of which two are highlighted in this paper: 1)
defining a framework and operationalizing the "diversity" of students, 2)
collecting "diversity" data to build diversity-aware algorithms. The paper
further reflects on the ethical challenges encountered during the design of a
diversity-aware platform.
