Gender in AI

The use of gender in technology:

1- Is not neutral (Miriam Sweeney ¹)

2 – Raises ethical complexities (Miriam Sweeney¹ again)

3 – Intersects with other systems of oppression (Patricia Hill Collins Matrix of domination and Intersecting oppressions²)

☝️This is a 💪 call to action 💪 for anyone working with technology that is gendered.

Failing to address the above means that we are complacent in the ‘IRL-DIgital feedback loop of shitty-ness’ (swear concept is mine but this came from reading / hearing the brilliant work of Virginia Eubanks in ‘Automating Inequality’ ³).

The patterns of interaction we are creating in digital worlds are not only building on and perpetuating IRL dominant notions of violence and oppression, but are also reinforcing them and reshaping them back IRL. It’s the IRL-Digital loop of shitty-ness.
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‘These were the key messages I wanted to pass on to people’ I thought, as cycled back to work from digital catapult where the event ‘UAL Digital Edge’ was taking place.

I was invited to speak by Dr. Charlotte Webb, who runs the Feminist Internet (FI) collective. I approached the FI with the idea for a public engagement project where via speculative design and co-participation we create counter stories about technology and engage with communities that sit outside the dominant narratives of technology.

As a result, we’ve run workshops in London and Barcelona that look at how gender is used in Personal Intelligent Assistants, and how we want the future use of gender in AI to be like.

I am looking for more communities to engage with. Get in touch if you want to be involved: elvia.vasconcelos@gmail.com

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Sources

1-  Not just a pretty (inter)face: A critical analysis of Microsoft’s ‘Ms. Dewey’ – Miriam Sweeney

2- Intersecting Oppressions – Patricia Hill Collins

3 – Automating Inequality – Virginia Eubanks

Part 3 – What is Speculative / Critical / Fiction / Design?

This post is the final part of a trilogy of posts that document my initial (and crude) investigations into Speculative Design and all its friends.

Part 1, is a collage of the snippets that tickled me the most in my initial (online) investigation on Speculative, Critical and Fiction Design.

Part 2, highlights from the book: ‘Speculative everything’ by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby.

This post grabs relevant passages from Speculative – Post-Design Practice or New Utopia? available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303686592_Speculative_-_Post-Design_Practice_or_New_Utopia

Exhibition website: http://speculative.hr/en/

Out of all the reading I have done, this is the most complete take on things, perhaps because it looks at all the people and concepts that are mentioned on the other 2 parts and makes the connections between them clear. It also adds a more global lenses to the thing and exposes the western centricity of it all.

Preparing for ‘Future artefacts’ course at CIID

The folks at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction design (CIID) are running a summer school and I will be joining them for a week long course on future artefacts 🙋. I am crazy excited because this will allow me to make tangible my recent explorations on speculative and critical design.

My practice has always been one of thinking through doing, yet I have in the past used my personal blog to document and reflect on my practice.

In this post I’ll document the things I am exploring in preparation for the course into 3 buckets:

Part 2 – What is Speculative / Critical / Fiction / Design?

This post is part of a trilogy of posts to document my initial (and crude) investigations into Speculative Design and all its friends.

Part 1, is a collage of the snippets that tickled me the most in my initial (online) investigation on Speculative, Critical and Fiction Design.

In here l’ll elaborate on my understanding from the book: ‘Speculative everything’ by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby.

For part 3, I will go through the work surrounding ‘Speculative – Post-Design Practice or New Utopia?’ Link 1 Link 2

What is speculative design?

Part 1 – What is Speculative / Critical / Fiction / Design?

Part 1, is a collage of the snippets that tickled me the most in my initial (online) investigation on Speculative, Critical and Fiction Design (I know the latter is really Design Fiction but, hey ho, it didn’t work with the other 2 and I like trilogies…).

Part 2, will be about what I find in the book ‘Speculative everything’ by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby.

For part 3, I will go through the work surrounding ‘Speculative – Post-Design Practice or New Utopia?’ Link 1 Link 2