Talks Archives | Alex Taylor

Panel talk: Prototyping AI ethics futures—Rights, access and refusal

Alex Taylor — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 11:47:51 +0000

Panel talk at 1:00pm–2:30pm, 23 June 2021 (BST), in association with Ada Lovelace Institute, The British Academy and The Arts and Humanities Research council.

Join us this Wednesday 23th at 1pm BST for the@justainet panel on “Rights, Access and Refusal” with @crystaljjlee @alxndrt and @maramills. Response from @sarahchander and chaired by @anthroptimist and @_louhicky https://t.co/3UUdNNzOsf

— JUST AI Network (@justainet) June 19, 2021

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Talk: The Capacities of Interaction

Alex Taylor — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 14:09:29 +0000

The @cityuni_hcid seminar series has been rebooted, with seminars now being held on the last Thursday of the month via Zoom. This month @alxndrt will talk about designing assistive technologies in ‘The Capacities of Interaction’. Sign up here: https://t.co/UH28xXjnMh #design #HCI pic.twitter.com/JBn0YEkaIZ

— Interaction Lab (@cinteractionlab) November 18, 2020

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Halfway to the Future

Alex Taylor — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 11:05:48 +0000

Alex Taylor giving a fascinating responsive talk after Lucy Suchman #httf2019 pic.twitter.com/UU0cgeSL0A

— Katherine Isbister (@kcisbister) November 19, 2019

Today’s final keynote is a remote but co-present conversation between @alxndrt and Lucy Suchman on the entanglement of human-machine agencies #httf2019 pic.twitter.com/VXCRF8jLyF

— Luigina Ciolfi (@luiciolfi) November 19, 2019

Speaking at the Mixed Reality Lab’s Halfway to the Future, in Nottingham. Very spoilt to have talked alongside a remote but still thoroughly present and inspiring Lucy Suchman.

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Data Bodies, Social Objects: S1 Art Space Sheffield

Alex Taylor — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 10:48:39 +0000

So grateful to Ilona Sagar for inviting me to join her at Park Hill’s S1 Artspace, in Sheffield. Laura Vaughan and I had the opportunity to respond to her thought provoking film Deep Structure, in a conversation title “Data Bodies, Social Objects”.

Fantastic talk from our ‘Data Bodies, Social Objects’ panel on Wednesday AND a fantastic turn out!

Thanks again to our guests Alex Taylor (@alxndrt), Laura Vaughan (@urban_formation) and @ilona_sagar

For our final event discussing ‘care’, 12th Dec https://t.co/rXwx41gYPV pic.twitter.com/ussThVTuek

— S1 Artspace (@S1Artspace) November 29, 2019

Laura Vaughan’s blog post sets the scene for our conversation.

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Seminar talk at Edinburgh Design Informatics

Alex Taylor — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 15:34:13 +0000

Really delighted to have presented at Design informatics this week.

“The grid/table partitions, breaks down bodies & labour. The grid/tables remake the body as an integral part to new infrastructure. The grid/table acts as a regulatory or disciplinary structure, dictating the possible” @alxndrt shakes the core of @DataCapitalEd @DesignInf pic.twitter.com/73tqu2ovLf

— chrisspeed (@chrisspeed) September 26, 2019

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HCID Open Day 2019

Alex Taylor — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 22:10:55 +0000

Great to be part of this year’s lively HCID Open Day, and present a short paper:

Living a larger life together.

ABSTRACT: I want to use this talk to think in broader terms about designing for good — to ask the question: “are we thinking and doing well with design?”

Stepping through a number of examples, I’ll invite us to reflect on some of the core tenets in UX design and HCI, ideas like human centredness, mediation and augmentation. Though valuable in moving us on from a problem-driven and highly instrumental version of design to something much more invested in people’s rich experiences, I’m going to propose such tenants are now limiting our imaginations. They have us narrowing our attention, placing the emphasis on the human’s capacities to act in and on the world. In other words they create the conditions for a utilitarian individualism, and leave little space for a design open to the always entangled interplay between a full-range of human and nonhuman actors.

I’ll argue that there is an alternative, much more generative way of thinking about and making with design, one that is committed to a relational becoming. This is an idea of relations that doesn’t reduce design to a practice that is good for the centred human, the human surrounded by tools that mediate or augment interaction. Instead, it is to recognise the correspondences, interdependencies, continual attunements and co-makings between diverse entities. It is to ask: what it might be to create the conditions for more to happen, what a design would look like that holds open the space for relations to proliferate and much more varied forms of life to come into being. This I want to propose is a design for good, a design that is full with the hope of living a larger life together.

“Table“work is the new “field“work… getting together for #HCID2019 #DesignForGood and making all kinds of connections. @alxndrt @daria_loi @tripsandflips_ @chrisspeed @racheleclarke @jaz_off and now time to listen to Daria and stop finding folk on Twitter… pic.twitter.com/nxHF3PUzJb
— Ann Light (@StrangertoHabit) June 18, 2019

The kind of communication that can occur without words is rich and deep. Why do we persist upon diminishing the power of those who cannot speak? @alxndrt #HCID2019 #DesignForGood pic.twitter.com/ORtz5GmUcW
— chrisspeed (@chrisspeed) June 18, 2019

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HCID Seminar talk

Alex Taylor — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 10:36:31 +0000

I had the pleasure of presenting as part of our very own HCID Seminar Series in November. I took the opportunity of trying out some early ideas about tables, a little clumsily testing out ideas of how tables have been used in the recording of bodies, from the slave trade to the algorithmic modes of bodily accounting so pervasive today.

See the abstract for the talk below.

“A return of slaves in the Parish of Jamaica, St Ann”, 28 June 1820. The National Archive.

Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification. Yoo Kim, arXiv.org, 2014.

The act of reading across and down, through the coordinate grid, to find information is a generative act. […]

This is not trivial, but essential, to the performative capabilities of tables.

Joanna Drucker

ABSTRACT: Through a number of routes, I’ve found myself thinking about tables, the kinds of tables with columns and rows. These tables lie behind so much of the proliferation of data and computation we are witnessing in contemporary life. They are also core to much of the work we do as researchers and designers. Yet too often we neglect the lively nature of these ordering technologies (Drucker 2014). In offering a practical solution for sorting and organising pretty much anything (e.g., numbers, times, dates, names, events, journeys, bodies, etc,), we overlook how they afford and authorise very particular ways of making matter matter (e.g. Rosenthal 2018; Wernimont 2018). Take Excel. The tool’s powerful capacities for ordering items in a seemingly infinite number of rows and columns—setting various systems of organisation against one another—is in no way inert. The explicit or implied hierarchies, the categories and comparisons, the roundings up or down, the spatial and calculative transformations, etc.—altogether, they are, already, telling a story. They are, if you will, technoscientific “worldings” (Haraway 2016).

I want to use this talk as a forcing function to explore this line of thought and the relevance it might have to the design of interactive systems. For now, my view is that much is to be understood from the close examination of ‘tables-in-action’. I believe we might discover many of the assumptions and biases we have in interpreting data and conducting research by attending to what we do with our tabulating practices—practices that, at first glance, appear so neutral. With this as a starting point, my hope will be to imagine worlds otherwise. To imagine intervening in the ways we work with tables so that we might extend and multiply the worlds we make possible.

Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual forms of knowledge production. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Harvard University Press, 2018.
Wernimont, Jacqueline. Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media. MIT Press, 2018.

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EASST 2018 Presentation

Alex Taylor — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 08:53:07 +0000

Abigail Durrant and I gave our paper “Modelling Cells in/with risky comakings and devious worlds” at EASST last week, in the fabulous Feminist Figures panel.

Very excited to see @alxndrt and @abigail_durrant present today in #feministfigures you both rocked! Not my best pic of the day but I really wanted to show this slide with #Haraway’s game of cats cradle in the background #EASST2018 pic.twitter.com/JWRqn34k0F

— Dr Amanda Windle (@anotherwindle) July 25, 2018

Modelling cells in/with risky comakings and devious worlds

ABSTRACT
We use String Figures and Involutionary Momentum to “read against the grain” of a contemporaneous biology characterised by reduction. Working through the design of a tool that models cellular stability, we spin a yarn of “affectively charged” relations between researchers, cells and technologies.
Drawing from her foundational studies of biology, Evelyn Fox Keller (2009:301) writes of a complexity and connectedness that might just characterise our “devious” world(s). She has traced threads through biology for over 40 years, drawing attention to—amongst other things—how it has often resisted the explanatory powers conferred upon its counterparts in other natural sciences. A pragmatic approach has dominated, she extols, in which unknowns have been a part of biology’s messy reality.
Looking ahead, to the deepening entanglements between biology and computation, we find contemporaneous imaginaries surrounding cellular life to be testing this lineage. Certainly—as Keller herself has reflected—computation makes possible very particular modes of understanding, ones conforming to the “reductive, mechanistic, and adaptationist logics” that characterise a prevailing neo-Darwinism (Hustak & Myers 2013:77).
In this paper, we wish to cut across what on the face it appears to be biology’s narrowing move. By ‘looking askew’, we hope to ask more about biology and whether or not it is being rendered computational. Examining a project invested in the computational challenges of modelling cellular stability, and relying on the “risky comakings” (Haraway 2016:14) between actors, algorithms and computational tools, we stay committed to the troubles enlivened by knotted relations. We use two feminist figures, Haraway’s String Figure, and Hustak and Myer’s Involutionary Momentum, to (re-)tell a story of unfolding relationships between researchers, cells and technologies, spinning a yarn of “affectively charged” (Hustak & Myers 2013) relays and knottings that resist singular figurings.
References
Haraway, D.J., 2016. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Hustak, C. and Myers, N., 2012. Involutionary momentum: Affective ecologies and the sciences of plant/insect encounters. differences, 23(3), pp.74–118.
Keller, E.F., 2009. Making sense of life: Explaining biological development with models, metaphors, and machines. Harvard University Press.

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Audrey, Anyone?

Alex Taylor — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 15:20:17 +0000

I just dug out my old Audrey, a computer appliance designed for the home released in 2000 and then canned in 2001. What a shame to think a device with such thoughtfully designed software and hardware was so quickly relegated to the dust-pile of e‑history. Anyway, seeing Audrey reminded me Laurel Swan and I presented a paper on Audrey at 4S in 2005 titled “Audrey, Anyone?” The abstract is below. We did manage to interview some of the original designers on the team including Ray Winninger. However, things got the better of us and we never wrote it up in finished form. Here’s the abstract we wrote:

Billed as the first digital home assistant, Audrey was released in November 2000. Jointly designed by the famed design firm, IDEO, and the tech industry’s then flavour of the month, 3COM, Audrey was praised for its industrial design and innovative appliance-like approach to home computing. Six months later, Audrey was on her way to the proverbial glue factory.

Named, somewhat incongruously, after Audrey Hepburn, the domestic appliance was conceived in response to the heavyweight computing paradigm prevalent in the day. The premise was a computer designed for the home; a simplified device with limited input mechanisms, a basic feature set and a softened aesthetic (available in five ‘kitchen matching’ colours: meadow, linen, ocean, slate and sunshine).
Interleaving interview transcripts recorded with two of Audrey’s design team with written materials available on the appliance, we consider why a technology failed that on the face of it was thoughtfully designed and strategically targeted. Self-reflection from the designers will be set against the hyperbole surrounding the product’s release and its cult status achieved in subsequently spawned online forums. Overall, the collected materials will be amassed to critically reflect on the sudden demise of Audrey. Given the lessons learnt from Audrey’s history, thought will also be given to whether it may be time to revisit the idea of an information appliance for the home and what form this appliance might take.

Wikipedia has an entry, here.

A short chapter we came across in doing background research on Audrey is Leslie Regan Share’s “The gendering of a communication technology: the short life and death of Audrey”, in Out of the Ivory Tower: Feminist Research for Social Change, edited by: Martinez, Andrea and Stuart, Meryn. Toronto: Sumach Press.

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Art and Tech Social at BOM

Alex Taylor — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 12:46:46 +0000

Happy to have been at the BOM gallery in Birmingham yesterday, presenting with the great Kyle McDonald on intelligence and AI, with some YouTube animal videos thrown in.

Hoorah! #artandtechsocial is back @BOMlab with @kcimc and @alxndrt pic.twitter.com/6wbvZFeBTl

— Karen Newman (@karen_new_) November 7, 2017

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