Oct 12th — Spaces for possibility
This is the summary for week 7 “Spaces for possibility” of Seminar 3 Advanced Interaction & Service Design Concepts / Design Theory & Practice. The aim of this course is to engage in critical discourses in design and explore and reflect on the implications of designing in the world, the agency of designed artifacts, and their effects not only in human systems but also in environmental ones.
We are currently covering the second module of our course called Mundane Intelligence. We talked about the definition of technology and intelligence. Then we discussed what AI is and means to human beings and society, and what is designer’s role is in it by exploring spaces for possibilities. This week, we covered the topic of “Spaces for possibility”.
This week, we had Daniel Cardoso Llach as a guest speaker to talk about AI and Data. He went over how AI was seen as the surrogate of the human, either being deemed as partners or slaves to designers. His argument was that we needed to look at technology through a critical lens and as a situated way of knowing. As the student reflected, “As we get used to seeing technology as the answer, it is not merely a solution, but propositions are informed by respective ideologies and politics.” Likewise, the other student also wrote “we can choose the ways in which we want to see and use technology as a collaborator rather than as a servant or competitor.”
Today is the last class of module 2 Mundane Intelligence, and we will move on to module 3 Research x Design next week. Accordingly, the students kicked off their pilot study and started to think about what area of thesis project or PhD research topic they would like to focus on.
- GUEST: Dr. Daniel Cardoso Llach
- Daniel Cardoso Llach. Sculpting Spaces Of Possibility: Brief History And Prospects Of Artificial Intelligence In Design. From The Routledge Companion to Artificial Intelligence in Architecture. 2021 (Read p. 13–26)
- Lucy Suchman. Human Machine Configurations. 2006 p. 69–84 (Read Ch 6 ‘Situated Actions’)
- Janet Vertesi. Seamful Spaces: Heterogeneous Infrastructures in Interaction. 2014
- PhDs only: Harry Collins, The science of artificial intelligence and its critics. 2021
