Investigations into Complex Computational Things in the Context of Design
Postdoctoral Research at the Umeå Institute of Design (2019-2020)
In my current postdoctoral work at the world-renowned Umeå Institute of Design at Umeå University in Sweden, I work collaboratively with Heather Wiltse and Johan Redström on a large design research project that aims to develop a “Design Philosophy for Things that Change”: a philosophical and aesthetical foundation that forms and informs a design practice capable of conceptually handling the complexity of the evolving, globally connected and locally manifested socio-technical landscapes now created using networked computational technologies and digital media (embedded computers, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, apps, smart assistants, etc.). This project is a 4-year endeavour funded by the Wallenberg Foundation.
We investigate ways of understanding and dealing with complex, computational, connected, ever-changing technologies we now live with (e.g. smart technologies like digital, AI-leveraging, voice-controlled personal assistants) in the context of design practice. These kinds of technologies bring about entirely new forms of technological agency and complexity; and with that major issues have emerged such as data privacy violations, online integrity infringements, and surveillance capitalism and, more generally, the ‘digital overload’ effects that can emerge from living with constantly connected devices. People commonly do not understand most of what the technologies they use truly do and are. This brings new challenges to the practices of design and a need for a deeper understanding of these kinds of things, their materiality, components, and functionalities not necessarily in the service of only human use. I believe that design research and practice need to play a bigger role in re-directing such technologies towards preferable futures which have largely been driven by innovations in engineering and dominated by large corporations like Google and Amazon and their capitalist goals. A key pathway forward is to develop research programs that take transdisciplinary approaches to transforming design that foreground social and ethical issues.
There are various different outputs in the works; they will be shared soon.
Speculating on Living With and Designing Artificial Agents
In applying a critical perspective, we work on a research through design project that uses a speculative design fiction approach to opening up the design space of agentive technologies and to better consider more responsible and ethical technology design. This research aims to re-imagine how we design, use, and live with digital personal assistants and values people’s privacy as well as social values, diversity and nuance over a one-size-fits-all solution. I question norms, values, and assumptions designed into current digital agents and co-speculate with people on what other more ethical kinds of alternatives could be possible for designing agents. A core motivation for this project is the recognition that there is both an undeveloped capability to better handle the kinds of complexity that are entailed in responsive, learning, agentive technological things, and that the possible design space for such things is much larger than what has so far been explored. This is especially true when considering opportunities for responsibly and ethically providing value for end users that lie outside of economic models based on data surveillance. This work directly relates to a digital ethics agenda.
This work-in-progress will be presented in November at the 2020 international Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations conference (PHTR).
A Widening Rift between Aesthetics and Ethics in the Design of Computational Things
In another part of our project we are investigating and describing a widening rift between aesthetics and ethics in the design of computational things. We wrote a journal article about this that is currently under review. The following two illustrations already offer key elements of this upcoming article. The left images shows a similar presentation and design of speakers that are however inherently different and in that sense show the widening rift of what things are and do and how that is presented. The right image is a graphical abstract of our article.
