Programme 2021

Keynote: Professor Susan Halford, Bristol Digital Futures Institute, University of Bristol

Digital technologies, devices and data are woven into the fabric of contemporary societies. The digital and the social are now co-evolving — in a ‘sociodigital’ world — with emergent consequences that raise profound challenges for equality, social cohesion and sustainability. The big question is: how can we be response-able for this world in the making? Chair: Professor Les Carr, Web Science Institute, University of Southampton.

Engaging Your Creative, Ethical Brain

Creative technologist and artist Kerry Harrison leads a short, creative exercise.

Talking to stakeholders about ethics can often feel very difficult, almost like communicating to beings on another planet! In this session, we’ll be using pens, pencils (or whatever you have handy) to try and communicate the main theme of our first keynote to those outside of our ‘world’. We’ll do this by drawing simple symbols, helping us to get our message across loud and clear. This fun exercise is all about leaving your screen for a few minutes, stretching your creative brain – and getting to the heart of what matters to you at the summit.

Trusting, auditing, and explaining algorithms

Gemma Galdon and Emma Lopez share their experience gained from a bottom-up approach to algorithmic auditing, combining both social science and computer science; Agnethe Grøn explains how a Service Design approach helped a team develop the explanations that different stakeholders need to trust an AI screening tool; and Lara Macdonald shares the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) findings on addressing bias and discrimination in an algorithmic age. Chair: David Barnard-Wills.

Humanising technology

Lorenn Ruster and Thea Snow share findings from a project on how to reimagine the role and responsibility of governments to proactively enable and support people to live their best lives using technology; Jennifer Cearns explores how we might design empathy into digital mental healthcare; and Emily Corrigan-Kavanagh shares a participatory approach to designing sound sensing technology to improve people’s urban lives. Chair: Corina Enache.

Refreshments and networking

Assemblages: algorithms, data privacy, and design

Antti Rannisto shares insights from Solita’s work on the Finnish Covid-19 tracing app and how human agency is entwined with algorithmic technologies; Gitika Saksena questions the universality of narratives on data privacy in the context of a contact-tracing app in India and provokes us to think about the assemblages that inform the negotiation with contact-tracing apps; and Sophie Adams-Foster asks us to consider the assemblages, networks, and design decisions that drive product design and innovation. Chair: Melanie Tan Uy.

AI and the Ethical Quandaries of Care Infrastructures in Africa

Azza Ahmed, Amina Soulimani, and Min’enhle Ncube draw on perspectives from East Africa (Rwanda), North Africa (Morocco) and Southern Africa (Zambia) to discuss digitised healthcare and the ethical quandaries of digital life, being and institutionalised care, as the continent understandably rushes to embrace new technologies in its project to decolonise progress and suffering. Chair: Ralph Borland.

Lunch, networking, yoga.

The online Yoga Bodhi session will run 14:00-14:20.

Doing Ethics

Luke Moffat explores a collaborative and creative method, Ethics through Design (EtD), that approaches ethics less as a tick-box exercise and more as a continuous and constitutive part of innovation; Sophie Taylor uses a case study to show how a local authority built trust among its residents around citizen data; and Maria Bell shares how researchers can advocate for and implement ethical review processes in the algorithmic product life cycle. Chair: Lisa Talia Moretti.

Designing for marginalised and forgotten communities

Eriol Fox asks us to think about how we explicitly include places and communities still ‘coming online’; Mariliis Öeren explores the challenges involved in designing digital solutions to improve mental health for people from lower socio-economic groups; and Anna Leggett shares a research project that explored opportunities to connect with marginalised communities during the pandemic. Chair: Damini Satija.

Refreshments and networking

Co-creation of unconference sessions

Co-create and collectively decide with your fellow delegates the unconference sessions you want on Friday 21 May.

Co-creation of today’s key takeaways

Co-create with your fellow delegates and collect your observations and takeaways from today’s sessions.

Conference close (day 1)

Fintech, auditing, and blockchain

Sharon Collard uses the Nationwide Building Society’s Open Banking for Good programme to illustrate how to solve for real fintech problems with a team of user experts, solution experts and process experts; Johannes Lenhard shows how ESG auditing of Venture Capitalists seems to be leading to shift in self-reproducing power structures; and Priyanka Dass Saharia explores the benefits and challenges to adopting distributed technologies (blockchain) in the context of the Aadhaar project in India. Chair: Erin B. Taylor.

Data: Privacy and Responsibility

Taru Rastas explores how corporations can design responsible and innovative data practices, using insights from a project with 7 organisations; Gilbert Hill shares his insights, as a CEO of a start-up designed to give people control over their data, how an ethical, humane approach can move us all beyond compliance towards data dialogue; and Daniel Stanley explores how we might increase public understanding of the importance of data and its protection. Chair: Laura Musgrave.

Anthropologists in tech and advertising

Lianne Potter explains why cybersecurity teams need to hire beyond technical expertise and look towards the social sciences for the next advancements in cyber fortification; Stephen Paff and Astrid Countee examine strategies for leveraging data science and anthropology in the tech sector to help address pressing complex societal issues; Tiffany Tivasuradej, an anthropologist working in advertising in Hong Kong, simplifies the fundamentals of designing purpose-driven brands that stay human and responsible to survive in today’s socio-digital world. Chair: Gigi Taylor.

KWMC Presents

Knowle West Media Centre, a digital arts organisation that runs Bristol’s Living Lab (as a part of ENoLL), will present a range of projects. Through tangible examples and some quick-fire creative exercises, Martha King, Clara Collett, and Fiona Dowling will show how an arts and co-design approach can help create responsible tech.

Projects showcased include Forms of Intelligence, which explores how animal and plant intelligence can inspire the co-design of new tech made to benefit all living things, not just humans; and Maker City which places young people at the centre of co-creating tech for social and environmental justice. Plus examples from ReThink, ReMake, ReCycle, which responds to the issue of household waste on both a local and global scale, and We Can Make, an award-winning citizen-led housing initiative.

National biometric identity systems: The case of Aadhaar

Aadhaar, India’s government-mandated national identity system, has been variously described as a model implementation of a biometric ID system and a restrictive, rights- and privacy-abusing attempt by the government to spy on and control its citizens. Since 2016 over 1 billion people have been registered and, despite its successes, concerns remain. In this panel discussion, we’ll explore the background and history of Aadhaar, and discuss the pros and cons of national biometric identity systems. A panel hosted by Yoti, with Ken Banks, Subhashish Panigrahi, Priyanka Dass Saharia, and Bidisha Chaudhuri.

Refreshments and networking

Unconference Sessions

These sessions create space for peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and creativity, and are convened by delegates who decide what they want to discuss.

Lunch, networking, and yoga.

The online Yoga Bodhi session will run 13:30-13:50.

Unconference sessions

These sessions create space for peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and creativity, and are convened by delegates who decide what they want to discuss.

Film screening and discussion: Circuits of Care: Ageing and Japan’s Robot Revolution

Japan is arguably the first post-industrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. David Prendergast, Professor in Science, Technology & Society at Maynooth University, will introduce and show his newly-released 35-minute documentary film, Circuits of Care: Ageing and Japan’s Robot Revolution, which explores the role of robots in the social care of Japan’s ageing population. Accompanied by the film’s producer, Naonori Kodate, Associate Professor of Social Policy and Social Robotics at University College Dublin, David will facilitate a discussion with delegates about the issues the film raises.

Workshop #1: The Digital Ethics Compass

The Digital Ethics Compass is a hands-on tool that helps companies develop an ethical sensibility when they are designing digital products. It also helps companies uncover and fix ethical problems and dilemmas in their existing products. The tool is developed by Danish Design Centre in cooperation with digital strategist Peter Svarre who will be hosting this workshop.

Workshop #2: Using Drawing to Understand Technology

Participatory drawing can be a powerful way to elicit research participants’ thoughts and feelings. This workshop, led by anthropologists Laura Haapio-Kirk and Jennifer Cearns, is an opportunity to reflect on our own experiences of technology, and to think about how drawing can aid ethnographic enquiry. Drawing elicitation can help researchers ground their enquiry in the affective and interior experiences of their interlocutors.

Workshop #3: Dancing With The Trouble of AI

Inspired by Donna Haraway and ritual design, together we will embrace the magical, illogical, delightful and laughable to inspire healthier and response-able AI. We will rehearse with our bodies, rituals for anticipating, noticing, and addressing ethical tensions — to nurture a mindset of collaborative creativity and radical care. You don’t need to be able to dance, but you will need video on and space to move. Led by Malé Luján Escalante, Vivienne Kuh, Lizzie Harrison, and Luke R. Moffat.

Workshop #4: Using Speculative Design to Shape Preferable Futures.

Speculative Design allows us to explore, hybridise, borrow, and embrace the many tools available for crafting ideas through fictional worlds, cautionary tales, what-if scenarios, and thought experiments. Using tools and methods borrowed from Speculative Design, we will explore how these can help broaden the horizon and foster interdisciplinary conversations between different stakeholders on how to build, design, and deploy tech responsibly. Led by Promila Roychoudhury-Koho, Andrea Vianello, and Sanna Vainionpää.

Workshop #6: Get Creative with Machine Learning

Machine learning isn’t just making an impact in academia and industry, it’s disrupting the creative industries too. Creatives are already using machine learning to make art, craft music, write poetry and inspire new ways of thinking. In this hands-on, exploratory workshop, creative technologist and artist Kerry Harrison will share some of her favourite machine learning creative projects and show you how you can make your own pieces using RunwayML and other available tools.

Unconference sessions

These sessions create space for peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and creativity, and are convened by delegates who decide what they want to discuss.

Keynote: Rakhi Rajani, Chief Digital Officer, Genomics England
Digital products and services live in the real world and are used by people and society, in context. Disciplinary hierarchy and disciplinary boundaries often hinder innovation. So let’s talk about how we innovate ‘at the intersections’, where brains from different disciplines such as the social sciences, engineering, design, and science bust out of their boxes and come together — instead of competing with each other — to generate solutions. Chair: Adam Warburton, Head of Digital Products, Co-op.

Closing remarks

Netflix Watch Party: Coded Bias

As a relaxing finish to the Summit, we’ll sink into our respective sofas at home with a glass of our favourite beverage and enjoy a Netflix Watch Party together. Released globally on Netflix on April 5, 2021, Coded Bias (90 minutes) is an exploration into the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s discovery of racial bias in facial recognition algorithms.

Netflix Party is a way to fun watch Coded Bias online with your fellow delegates as it adds group chat to Netflix. Delegates will be sent instructions to join the Netflix Party as well as the official Coded Bias Discussion Guide.