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- Our Lady of Technology Tarot Cards (2021)
Authors: Tessa Forshaw, Rich Braden, Ailsa Petrie, Natasha Bach
Abstract: For too long, tech has had a (misplaced) reputation that it is by men and for men. We have consistently seen this play out in design thinking classes we teach at the Stanford d.school and Harvard DCE, as well as workshops with clients: women participants regularly remove themselves from conversations about emerging technologies and defer to their male colleagues.
This has consequences for all of us. Excluding voices in the innovation process means that we’re not designing products and solutions with all needs in mind. It also means that innovation spaces lack a diversity of perspectives that they sorely need.
Our Lady of Technology Tarots Cards aims to change that.
Drawing on the tradition of tarot, these cards reimagine the 22 Major Arcana to represent the big technology trends that are influencing life as we know it. Each card provides a definition, characteristics, and applications of a specific technology, such as IoT sensors, machine learning, and bioinformatics.
Driven by our observations and conversations with our female students, colleagues and clients, we created the deck as a tool to help women, and any others who have felt excluded from tech conversations. Our aim is to build competency in a space that has long kept a diversity of voices out. We hope that by using this deck, all learners will feel empowered to not just see what the future might look like, but to help prototype and design it too.
You can learn more about them here: https://designawards.core77.com/Visual-Communication/108183/Our-Lady-of-Technology-Tarot-Cards
Photocredit: Ailsa Petrie
PubDate: 2023-02-19
Issue No: Vol. 13 (2023)
- Disentangling Futures from a Science and Technology Studies Perspective
Authors: Stefano Crabu, Paolo Magaudda
Abstract: Abstract: In the last decade, science and technology studies have paid increasing attention to the role of futures, anticipatory expectations, and forward-looking statements in co-defining the nexus between science, technology and society. This broad interest is articulated into several research streams, from the assessment of long-term futures of technological innovation and setting out how future-oriented socio-technical imaginaries act upon real-time technoscientific innovation to actionable anticipatory frameworks and scenarios adopted to intervene in science, technology and innovation governance. This paper introduces the special section Disentangling Features, which collects four lectures from the teaching and mutual learning activities held during the VI STS Italia Summer School, organised at the University of Padova in September 2022. By situating the four lectures within a composite conceptual framework, the paper discusses the relationship between the future and technoscientific processes in the context of science and technology studies with an emphasis on the performative role of futures and imaginaries in co-shaping knowledge-making practices and technological developments.
Keywords: future; technoscientific expectations; socio-technical imaginaries; promises; art-science collaborations.
PubDate: 2023-02-19
Issue No: Vol. 13 (2023)
- The Roots of Neglect: Towards a Sociology of Non-Imagination
Authors: Barbara Prainsack
Abstract: Abstract: The sociology of expectations has helped academics and policy analysts to understand how socio-technical imaginaries are not only hypothetical and “in the future”, but how they create realities in the present. They do so by shaping what gets funded, who gets hired, and even how people lead their lives as they consider some futures more likely than others. While this focus on the performative power of specific visions and expectations has been hugely important, there is another situation that has arguably been at least equally impactful on the present: the absence of (alternative) expectations of the future. It is the absence of specific imaginations of the future that people deem desirable that explains why, despite being fully aware of political and economic practices and arrangements that are detrimental for human and planetary health, we have not changed these arrangements.
Keywords: non-expectations; neoliberalism; strategic ignorance; complexity; crisis.
PubDate: 2023-02-19
Issue No: Vol. 13 (2023)
- Promising Technosciences in the Economy of Attention: Why Have Pessimistic
Stories of Disruption and “Artificial Intelligence” Performed so Well'
Authors: Marc Audétat
Abstract: Abstract: The promises connected to emerging science and technology do not merely assist research and innovation, but are a part of it. Their diverse roles in producing hype and ensuring coordination have been extensively studied in the sociology of expectations. However, promises also circulate on a massive scale in the media sphere, as occurred with nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, recounting what the future will be like. The popularity that technoscientific visions manage to attract is less well studied and understood, although it is closely connected with how research is directed and innovation funded – and thus deserves more attention. This contribution explains why so much promising and visioneering is taking place, identifies a “regime of promising”, and discusses its implications for the relationship between science and society. Drawing on cultural and media studies to expand the sociology of expectations, it attempts to better understand the role of fiction in building socio-technical imaginaries.
Keywords: promising technosciences; credibility; popularity; economy of attention; counter-fiction; scenarization.
PubDate: 2023-02-19
Issue No: Vol. 13 (2023)
- Remaking Intelligence' Of Machines, Media, and Montage
Authors: Philippe Sormani
Abstract: Abstract: Over the last decade, there has been a renewed interest in “artificial intelligence” (AI), notably in the form of “machine learning” (ML). This renewed interest may seem paradoxical, insofar as John McCarthy introduced the term “AI” in the mid-1950s to mark a distinction with ML, championing deductive reasoning over automated induction (e.g., Cardon et al. 2018). By contrast, the current reversal, towards ML-based forms of “AI,” marks the statistical, if not spectacular, revival of automated induction. However, the terms used – revival, renewal, reversal – beg the question of the common ground of the involved alternatives. Taking its cue from recent historical (e.g., Penn 2020), relevant conceptual (e.g., Shanker 1998), and prior critical (e.g., Agre 1997) inquiries, this paper outlines a praxeological answer to the raised question. For the purpose, the paper develops a practice-based video analysis of a recent demonstration of “machine intelligence,” the video demonstration of an “agent system” playing Breakout at “superhuman level,” if not opening the gate for the advent of “general AI” (Hassabis 2017). In examining and engaging in “remaking intelligence” in situ, the paper dwells on the tricky interplay between machines, media, and montage, while making explicit and reflecting upon how particular configurations of “enchanted determinism” (Campolo and Crawford 2020) are staged and locally performed.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; breakout game; common ground; machine learning; practical reenactment(s); video demonstration.
PubDate: 2023-02-19
Issue No: Vol. 13 (2023)
- That Obscure Object of Desire: Some Notes for a Slow Art-Science
Authors: Silvia Casini
Abstract: Abstract: Although not a book that can be labelled as “art-science”, the novel Atlante Occidentale (1985), published in English as Lines of Light, was conceived by the Italian writer Daniele Del Giudice during a fieldwork visit at the CERN laboratory in Geneva in the early 1980s. The two protagonists, the writer Ira Epstein and the physicist Pietro Brahe, have a common obsession: the drive to experimentation. Both characters seek to create new tools (machines) out of existing material for understanding reality – Pietro a particle collider, Ira the written word. As I argue in the article, Atlante Occidentale, a work of fiction, makes a point which should be at the core of any attempt to better understand art-science collaboration: art and science are both ways of world-making.
The article provides readers with a brief overview of the mainstream narratives on and in art-science collaboration and suggests a series of strategies apt for challenging those narratives. First, I argue that experimentation rather than creativity is the glue making any collaboration between art and science possible. Second, I show the importance for both scholars and artists of carrying out laboratory fieldwork and archival research to access science in the making and, hence, to engage in potentially transformative art-science collaborative work. Finally, I call for a radical rethinking of the scale and syntax of art-science projects given that some of the most successful models of such collaborative endeavours are in deep crisis.
Keywords: art-science collaboration; experimentation; fiction; art-science amateurs.
PubDate: 2023-02-19
Issue No: Vol. 13 (2023)
- On Old Age and Its Multiplicity: Exploring Discourses and Materialities
about Getting Older
Authors: Francesco Miele, Nicoletta Bosco, Valeria Cappellato, Elisa Castellaccio, Enrico Maria Piras
Abstract: Abstract: Old age is at the core of complex constellations composed by media discourses, care and mundane activities, and affective and technological practices that involve a wide range of human and non-human actors. While during the last years concepts such as “active” and “successful” ageing have more and more emphasised the individual responsibility of older adults in managing their own health, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic elderly have been increasingly framed as vulnerable subjects. This Crossing Boundaries will explore the different instances assumed by the “old age” as an emerging object by the enactment of discourses and materialities. In doing so, this Crossing Boundaries mobilizes different theoretical perspectives, such as STS, media studies and sociology of health. The authors will explore three main issues: 1) the public discourse about the health status of older people; 2) the collective management of Alzheimer’s disease in and outside institutions; 3) the involvement of older adults in designing information and communication technologies.
Keywords: old age; pandemics, Alzheimer, gerontotechnology; vulnerability.
PubDate: 2023-02-19
Issue No: Vol. 13 (2023)
- Borders, Migration, and Technology in the Age of Security: Intervening
with STS
Authors: Paul Trauttmansdorff
Abstract: Abstract: In recent years, a broad and multidisciplinary literature has emerged at the intersection of critical border and migration studies, critical security studies, and science and technologies studies (STS). This literature has produced a rich conceptual repertoire for the analysis of digital technologies and infrastructures of border control and mobility governance. This scenario conceptually maps some of the core strands in this debate, which portray borders as complex and multi-located arrangements that create spaces of control and circulation, notions and images of “trusted” and/or “risky” travelers, and a globalized hierarchy of mobility rights. Furthermore, the scenario reflects on some major research avenues for STS to intervene in this debate and expose how border regimes are today imagined, designed, maintained, and critiqued.
Keywords: border studies; migration studies; security studies; border multiple; data infrastructures.
PubDate: 2023-02-19
Issue No: Vol. 13 (2023)
- Book Reviews
Authors: Redazione Tecnoscienza
Abstract: F. Miele
Anziani, salute e società: Politiche di welfare, discorso pubblico e cura quotidiana [Older people, health and society: Welfare policies, public discourse and daily care]
Bologna, il Mulino, 2021, pp. 180
by Michela Cozza
A. Balzano, E. Bosisio, I. Santoemma (eds.)
Conchiglie, Pinguini, Staminali: Verso Futuri Transpecie [Shells, Penguins, Stem Cells: Toward Trans-species Futures]
Roma, DeriveApprodi, 2022, pp. 288
by Gioacchino Orsenigo
B. Latour, É. Hermant
Paris Ville Invisible [Paris: Invisible City]
Paris, B42, 2021, pp. 184 [reedition of Paris Ville Invisible, Paris, La Découverte, 1998]
by Julio Paulos
C. Fuchs
Digital Capitalism: Media, Communication and Society Volume Three
London, Routledge, 2021, pp. 342
by Maurizio Teli
M. Liboiron
Pollution is Colonialism
Durham, Duke University Press, 2021, pp. 216
by Miriam Tola
K. Ermoshina, F. Musiani
Concealing for Freedom: The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and Digital Liberties
Manchester, Mattering Press, 2022
by Michele Veneziano
PubDate: 2023-02-19
Issue No: Vol. 13 (2023)
- Tecnoscienza Nr. 26 (FULL PDF)
Authors: Redazione Tecnoscienza
PubDate: 2023-02-19
Issue No: Vol. 13 (2023)
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