Critical AI & Crisis Interrogatives (CRAI-CIS) Seminar
Monthly dialogues and critical perspectives on artificial intelligence, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), participatory design, and crisis-related research for societal impact.
The CRAI-CIS Seminars engage emerging work across critical AI, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), participatory design, and crisis-related research. The seminars seek to invoke dialogues on how computational, human-centred, and social sciences perspectives can offer new insights and methods for inclusive approaches and critical inquiry with societal impact.
Each event features invited speakers who share distinct perspectives, ongoing research, methods, and challenges for future work in a 45 minute talk, followed by Q&A and space for mingling and networking. The talks will be recorded for open access in the future.
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SARAH pink: Life and Tech at the Edge: Refiguring Possible Futures
Time: September 20, 2023, 16:00–17:30
Venue: Event is hybrid. Participants may attend in person (T2, Computer Science Building, Aalto University) or online on Zoom.
Abstract:
How might automation become part of possible futures, shaped by everyday life? And how might people, other species and environment participate in the ways that automated systems and technologies emerge? In this talk I refocus the concept of emerging technologies away from seeing them as the drivers of societal change, towards asking how existing and future technologies might emerge as participants in sustainable futures. I will discuss design ethnographic futures and documentary filmmaking research undertaken in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, focusing for example on energy futures, future mobilities and air futures. I will argue for a new futures focused movement in social science, to join design, computer science and other disciplines in reshaping how futures are conceptualised and constituted in ways that build on but go beyond the conventional work of futurists, foresight, forecast and predictive data analytics, and I will explore the concept of the Edge and how it might help us to work towards futures in ways that surpass existing approaches.
Speaker Bio:
Sarah Pink (PhD, FASSA) is a design and futures anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. She is founding Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Australia and a CI and research leader in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Sarah is also an Associate Director of Monash University Energy Institute and Visiting Professor at Halmstad University in Sweden and Loughborough University in the UK. Her most recent publications include the books Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future (2023) and Design Ethnography (2022) and the documentary films Smart Homes for Seniors (2021) and Digital Energy Futures (2022).