Today’s emerging technologies will affect our lives at an unprecedented scale.
Besides their promised benefits, they will come with lots of (unintended) consequences.
Recent examples such as the ‘racist soap dispenser’ (utilizing a hand sensor that is ‘blind’ to black skin) and a Google image sorting algorithm that misclassified a picture of a black couple as gorillas (based on a flawed image set the algorithm was trained with) exemplify some of the issues of these systems.
These very public examples makes one wonder what other hidden ethics are currently being encoded into the underlying systems of our future products.
Since we–as designers–utilize these technologies at scale and design their interfaces to our everyday lives, what will be our role, especially coming from our human centered perspective?
How do we have to not only explore their potential to drive new products but also explore the potential social implications before our products are being released “into the wild”?
At the same time, to what extent do we as designers want to be–and realistically even can we be–involved in ethically fine-tuning the complex inner workings of the increasingly incomprehensible technologies that we work with?
Starting with recent examples of real world imperfect futures, this talk will propose new approaches to unpacking these black boxes. By making their implications visible for discussion we can actively help to shape what the ethics of our future products should be.
It will propose new methods of transforming social speculations into more participatory futures that go beyond just visualizing their potential implications. By making these implications experiential, we can enable new discussions that are informed by own experience rather than only theoretical awareness.
Involving the audience in a participatory thought experiment, it showcases how easily we all get tricked by our own, inherent biases.
The talk finalizes in proposing new approaches to extend our relevance as designers to ethics and past merely designing the inputs and outputs for tomorrow’s technological black boxes.
