We’re excited to be offering two fully funded PhD Studentships in the HCID Centre at City. See:
Beneath the archive
Understanding users’ mental models of digital archives
to inform user-centred design for humanities research
Application deadline 20 May 2018.
Artificial Intelligence for Teams
The Future of Collaborative Work in Organisational Life
Application deadline 27 May 2018.
From the Picket Line
For those of us in UK academia, it’s been impossible to miss the strikes over the last four weeks, with academics from across the country standing their ground for a fair and equitable pension. There are many incredibly detailing the developments and explaining how this is about for a walk of life that just doesn’t have to be subject to the warped values of the Neo-liberal project.
Personally, what I’ve found inspirational is the coverage from the picket line and the industry of others. Naturally, there have been the marches, the banners, and the teach-ins. But, with such generative care and warmth, what has brought special cheer to me have been the many outstanding examples of creative impulse: of craft (like that recorded by Jacob Phelps below), of design (from Katja May, Kat Jungnickel, etc. at Goldsmiths), and of poetry (no less from the fabulous Michael Rosen).
Given it would be hard to add to all the amazing commentary on the pension strikes, what I want to pay special homage to here is the dance (and a little song) from the picket line. Browsing the not-so-distant twitter archive, I’ve tried to dig out a few out the highlights from the last few weeks that can’t help bring a smile to my face. It must be said, that among all the wonderful examples, Lancaster goes gold hands down for the PEF (Picket Excellence Framework), and Imogen Tyler deserves a special award of excellence for her unwavering commitment to impact dissemination, Twitter-wide.
Here’s to all the dancers (and musicians) on the picket line
#fromthepicketline this morning @LancasterUCU Witt the Atomic Brass Band #ussstrikes #UCUstrike pic.twitter.com/y9OQJVvBDl
— Imogen Tyler (@ProfImogenTyler) March 15, 2018
For example, from Jason Hickel, David Kernohan, via Medium, etc. Karen Gregory has put together a list of UCU Strike Readings. Lucy Robinson’s strike scrapbook also deserves a special mention.
See by Six points on the eve of the UCU strike Jamie Woodcock
PhD studentships at City
Just trying to promote as widely as possible:
My School has just announced ten PhD studentships. I’d love to have strong applications from prospective students wanting to join the Centre for Human-Centered Design (HCID).
There’s a list of research topics here. The deadline is 25th April 2018. For the full advert, see here.
Personally, I’m very open to suggestions on topic. It would be thrilling to see proposals for critical and perhaps materialist orientations to technoscience. Oh, and feminist, intersectional thinking would be high on my wish list.
Whatever the persuasion, if you have friends, students, colleagues, etc. interested in doing something exciting, please put them in touch.
CHI 2018 papers.
Anja Thieme, Cynthia L. Bennett, Cecily Morrison, Edward Cutrell and Alex Taylor (2018) “I can do everything but see!” – How People with Vision Impairments Negotiate their Abilities in Social Contexts. In Proceedings CHI ’18. ACM Press.
Ari Schlesinger, Kenton O’Hara and Alex Taylor (2018) Lets Talk about Race: Identity, Chatbots, and AI. In Proceedings CHI ’18. ACM Press.
Very happy to have contributed to two papers being presented at the upcoming CHI conference this year. One reports on work with the blind and vision impaired a few of us have been involved in different ways (see here). Broadly, we’ve used the piece to reflect on the relations between vision impairment and artificial intelligence, and set out directions for a possible design space.
The second paper picks up on a new theme for me, but one closely related to past reflections and design work around machine intelligence. With the fantastic Ari Schlesinger (GA Tech) leading the research, we examine the challenges faced in handling race talk (and racism) in human-bot interactions. Taking both Tai AI and the blacklist as starting points, we take seriously the computational underpinnings of chat bots and conversational agents, to underscore the role they have in sustaining troubling racial categories and the conditions they make possible for more just and equitable ways forward.
Abstract — This research takes an orientation to visual impairment (VI) that does not regard it as fixed or determined alone in or through the body. Instead, we consider (dis)ability as produced through interactions with the environment and configured by the people and technology within it. Specifically, we explore how abilities become negotiated through video ethnography with six VI athletes and spectators during the Rio 2016 Paralympics. We use generated in-depth examples to identify how technology can be a meaningful part of ability negotiations, emphasizing how these embed into the social interactions and lives of people with VI. In contrast to treating technology as a solution to a ‘sensory deficit’, we understand it to support the triangulation process of sense-making through provision of appropriate additional information. Further, we suggest that technology should not try and replace human assistance, but instead enable people with VI to better identify and interact with other people in-situ.
Abstract — Why is it so hard for chatbots to talk about race? This work explores how the biased contents of databases, the syntactic focus of natural language processing, and the opaque nature of deep learning algorithms cause chatbots difficulty in handling race-talk. In each of these areas, the tensions between race and chatbots create new opportunities for people and machines. By making the abstract and disparate qualities of this problem space tangible, we can develop chatbots that are more capable of handling race-talk in its many forms. Our goal is to provide the HCI community with ways to begin addressing the question, how can chatbots handle race-talk in new and improved ways?
Audrey, Anyone?
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:
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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.
Paper presented at Assets
I’m very happy to have been a part of the work leading up to a paper presented at Assets 2017, the ACM conference on Accessible Computing. Reporting on work from a group of us at Microsoft Research, the paper describes an orientation to our studies with the blind and vision impaired.
Cecily Morrison, Edward Cutrell, Anupama Dhareshwar, Kevin Doherty, Anja Thieme, and Alex Taylor. 2017. Imagining Artificial Intelligence Applications with People with Visual Disabilities using Tactile Ideation. In Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 81–90. DOI.
Art and Tech Social at BOM
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
What are you reading?
Happy to have the short conversation I had with @danielarosner published in Interactions Magazine’s regular “What are you reading?” column. We experiment with a brief interchange about two wonderful books: Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and Sarah Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life.
Below is the long-winded version before tidying and editing.
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Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.
HCID seminar talk
Six weeks into the new job and I’ve been given a seminar slot.
Here’s the abstract:
Think we must *
Virginia Woolf (1938) Three Guineas. Hogarth Press.
‘The world is a mess.’ @alxndrt makes three propositions to make sense of it #hcidseminar pic.twitter.com/dMGKC69mC1
— Ernesto Priego (@ernestopriego) October 20, 2017
It’s been a thrill to join HCID and City and to be welcomed so warmly by many of you. In this talk, I’d like to introduce myself in a more deliberate way, spinning a thread through my career path that captures what’s important to me and what has helped me find my way.
Starting way back with work at Xerox, and then my twists and turns into academia and then industry again, at Microsoft, I’ll talk through punctuated moments in my research—about teenagers and their mobile phones; families living amongst their clutter; and neighbourhoods coping with communal life and data aggregates. What I’ll try to convey is how it’s been a thinking that has animated me throughout this work, a thinking not always with clarity and certainly a thinking with many knots and frayed ends, but nevertheless a thinking. A point I want to reflect on, then, is how ideas thread into our work, weaving together a lively tapestry. I like the way Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers use, involutions here as a “ ‘rolling, curling, turning inwards’ that brings distinct species together to invent new ways of life” (2013: 96).
Through my own involutions, I’ll try to use this talk to work my way to a thinking that has a generative mode—a mode with both an openness and an ongoingness to it that invites more, always more. For me, this is a mode of thinking that affects oneself and that demands a care, because it is not just about studying the worlds we inhabit, it is about making those worlds and the conditions of possibility that come with them. I suppose, above all else, this is a talk inviting a thinking of this kind that we might do together—it is to pose an open question about our thinking and about what worlds we might make possible.
* My title is inspired by Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret who borrow the phrase “Think we must” from Virginia Woolf, and use it to ponder generatively on their lives in the academy.Hustak, C & Myers N. 2013. “Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters.” differences 23(3):74–118.Stengers, I., & Despret, V (2015). Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf. University of Minnesota Press.
“Keeping open”
“… to keep unpacking, revealing, opening and unconcealing, we need also to think differently. Alongside unpacking and connecting we need to argue for different worlds to those which dominate us.”
I’m delighted to be starting a new job this September at City, University of London. I’ll be joining the lively Centre for HCI Design (HCID). Both Steph and Simone, the centre’s co-directors, have been amazingly generous in preparing me for my new role and discussing the directions we might take things in. I’ve also begun to rough out new lines of research with my soon to be colleagues and I eagerly anticipate setting things in motion. Naturally my challenge will be to keep a lid on my enthusiasm, leaving the energy to improve my teaching and engage a student cohort in caring about the entanglements between technology and social life—and the thrills and spills that come with such a care. (more…)
From Joanna Latimer and Beverley Skeggs article, The politics of imagination: keeping open and critical.
William Kentridge — “A drawing lesson”
“… can we be better than who we are, can we be other than who we are?”
I’ve been trying to think about capability for a little while and trying to make sense of how we become able. What I’ve wanted to get away from is an idea of ability that we feel defined or limited by—the presumed limits of ability dictated, supposedly, by our bodily and mental capacities.
Today I came across this lovely video of and by the artist William Kentridge. He expresses so much of what has engaged me in this subject matter, but with such eloquence and so vividly.
Article in Design Issues
Design Issues, Summer 2017, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 25–36
ABSTRACT — In his 2015 Research Through Design provocation, Tim Ingold invites his audience to think with string, lines, and meshworks. In this article I use Ingold’s concepts to explore an orientation to design—one that threads through both Ingold’s ideas and Vinciane Despret’s vivid and moving accounts of human-animal relations. This is a “thinking and doing” through design that seeks to be expansive to the capacities of humans and non-humans in relation to one another.
I’m so pleased to finally have this article published in Design Issues, and very grateful to Abigail Durrant, John Vines, Jayne Wallace, and Joyce Yee for all their help with editing my text and the Special Issue: Research Through Design: Twenty-First Century Makers and Materialities.
In my contribution, I’ve reflected on Tim Ingold’s provocation at the Biennial Research Through Design conference, and tried to play around with opening up a more generative kind of design. My experiment has been to put Ingold’s ideas of lines and meshworks in conversation with Vinciane Despret’s uplifting stories of animals and becomings. A strange mix, but one that for me at least raises plenty of interesting questions — and isn’t it more questions we need?!
For an early draft of the article see:
What lines, rats and sheep can tell us, Design Issues 2017