Talk at RCA, Design Products

I had a very gen­er­ous slot for pre­sent­ing to some in Design Prod­ucts at the RCA this week.

 
In this talk, I want to sug­gest we have spent too much time work­ing with the lim­its of capability—the lim­its of the per­cep­tu­al appa­ra­tus, the lim­its of cog­ni­tive capac­i­ties, and the lim­its of how crit­ters (whether human or non­hu­man) inter­act and relate to one anoth­er. Draw­ing on a fem­i­nist techno­science and using exam­ples from recent field­work, I’ll aim to show that, togeth­er, we make our­selves capa­ble. That capa­bil­i­ty isn’t lim­it­ed to some pre-giv­en, indi­vid­ual state, but comes into being through (inter)action, through entan­gled rela­tions between actors of all kinds. This, I’ll claim, gives us a very dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about our rela­tions with tech­nol­o­gy and espe­cial­ly the promise of AI and machine learn­ing. Rather than machines aim­ing to repli­cate human capa­bil­i­ty, I want to pro­pose an expan­sive project that allows us the chance to imag­ine some­thing ‘oth­er-than’ finite capa­bil­i­ties, that sees capa­bil­i­ty as a ‘becom­ing-with’, and lays open the pos­si­bil­i­ties for much much more.