DCODE / The Finale

At the end of the DCODE Network and time to live blog on the outcomes from the ESRs…

Observation 1: The projects operate across 1. the promise that data-driven systems are able to look across social-technical systems at scale, 2. and somehow simultaneously afford individuals opportunity to pursue their projects and practices according to their own intersectional capacities and capabilities. Of course, the propensity for digital systems to ‘make efficient’ systems through atomisation rather than collaboration continues to hamper any potential to commensurate data value and environmental values. Francesco Maria Turno

Observation 2: The research has enabled them to introduce some turns in language of what it means to design between these constructs – from interface, to acts of interfacing. The multi-intentionality between humans and more-than humans involves co-performativity, negotiation, and ultimately significant contingency. Yuxi Liu

Observation 3: A sophistication has emerged that recognises the designers disposition of making of worlds, and their making of us (after Tony Fry), but an increasing sensitivity of who we are making worlds for. The work addresses the hubris of design, as well as offering an expanded sense of how experiments with AI offers ways to dis-identify and subvert the logics of data-driven technology. Grace L Turtle re-turns to the body as the place to resolve ‘new’ design practices.

Observation 4:  In the further acceleration of data-driven systems, there is a need for us to believe that they are contestable. Recovering Carl DiSalvo’s Design for Politics, Robert Collins walks participants between the Critical and the Affirmative to increase the attention paid to both the system (often futuring) and the circumstances (the manifestation of systems in front of us). Repair of digital products being the space for practice that com-posites the contestable.

Observation 5: Working with cardiologists in Leiden, Somayeh Ranjbar is following the threads of meaning, value and disruption between patients and clinicians as a data-driven device (MI Box) mediates medical data between both parties. This ‘third party’, a black box, cuts upon and reveals the learning journey that the patient and their consultant goes on. Studying the shifts in power, DCODE design research returns to STS.

Observation 6: Staying with medicine, Natalia-Rozalia Avlona uncovers the quality of data – or not. Spending time in institutions to explore how ‘data quality’ is defined and produced, the work reveals significant inconsistency. Nevertheless, inconsistency is not a reason to fall behind, and whatever the quality, organisations need to move on to ‘build, measure, learn’ (the mantra of innovation).

Observation 7: Robots are often rereferred to as ‘embodied AI’. In a turn away from the reductionist starting point that all things are ‘embodied data’, Youngsil Lee studies the tomato. Represented as organic products in supermarkets, but highly regulated and produced in controlled, data-driven systems of agriculture, she jumps from the technology of things to the nature of things, to reveal the determinism in representing things as data.


Observation 8: Understanding the connection between the micro-cosmos, meso-cosmos and macro-cosmos’s of indigenous cultures Carlos Guerrero Millan explores how technical assemblages in communities are constructed to manage, control and represent data to preserve Masewal cultures. The Western ‘stack’ gives way to entirely different technical assemblages.

Observation 9: Reimagining governance within infrastructures, Aditi Surana has spent time within very large institutions as they have adopted, deployed and reorganised around AI technologies. Spanning the last 4 years in which Gen-AI is only one product that provides a shared experience through use, the research has revealed the unclear definitions, the gaps in knowledge and limited governance models that have emerged at speed. Design cards for participatory workshops, redesigned for every setting, reveal the complexities of every institution. Outcomes highlight the impossibility of value alignment, inevitable power asymmetries and obfuscated responsibilities when AI is adopted.

Observation 10: The Terms of Service remain persistent starting points for flawed relationships with technical systems. Introducing the term ToSsphere to describe Terms of Service Sphere, Seda Özçetin frames the use of ToS as gaslighting since the citizen is never realistically offered a journey toward informed consent. In contrast what might be Eco-Social Contracts as translation zones for alternative words for alternative worlds? From entanglement, care, other-than-human…

Observation 11: People will remember Toronto’s smart city of 2017. Pamela Gil Salas ‘roots’ out the problems to expose a data colonialism, what it does, what it looks like and what it’s impact looks like. In sharp contrast, and as a form of recovery, ‘Autonomia(s)’ refer to collective agencies and the opportunities to revisit how data governance can better support justice and an ethics of care.

Observation 12: The gap between normative principles and actual application (after Correa et al) became the focus for Sonja Rattay to understand the ethical implications of designing with technology. Reminding us that design with tech is and was always an ethical concern, she adopts imaginaries to unpack ‘AI as a Moral Device’ . The work reveals the tensions and implications of moral awareness and ethical sensitivity – moral stress, emotional labour, and impacts upon relational configurations. Great punch line toward guideposts (not frameworks): There is no ethical practice – all practice is ethical…

Observation 13: How is technology colonial? Adopting Hauntology as a theoretical premise for revealing the forces of data coloniality, Mugdha Patil speculates on the possibility / impossibility of relinquishing the ghosts. Not only are the data sets that drive the production of new spaces haunted, but perhaps more damaging are the elements of particular social or cultural pasts that persist to colonise futures.

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