Event Details

Surveillance Conversation

Speaker: Professor Paul Coulton

Date: 6th December

Time: 9am - 10:30am

Location: In Person InfoLab21 Room D55

Title: Surveillance by Design

Abstract: Contemporary data driven digital systems frequently contain complex assemblages of human and non-human actants. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an example of this whereby the ‘things’ within such networks transcend their physical forms and extend to include algorithms, humans, data, business models, etc. and each imports independent-but-interdependent motivations and perspectives. What differentiates IoT devices from their non-IoT counterparts is not simply the added complexity but rather the new types of agency, value, and power that they enable through the networkification of the existing non-internet world which is effectively enabling data driven surveillance by design. This surveillance is often hidden from users, sometimes deliberately and in other cases through the application of so-called human centred design as one of its core axioms is simplicity which often means obfuscating actions not directly associated with the task from the user. In this talk I explore the notion of more than human centred design to facilitate greater legibility, agency, and negotiability associated with data enabled products and services.

Bio: Paul Coulton is the Chair of Speculative and Game Design within the School of Design at Lancaster University. Speculative Design combines real and/or hypothetical extrapolations of the development of emerging technologies with a consideration of the cultural landscape into which they may be deployed. He has pioneered a particular practice of Speculative Design which is Design Fiction as a way of exploring futures for areas such as the Internet of Things, Cybersecurity, and Artificial Intelligence. Design Fictions are collections of artefacts, that, when viewed together build a fictional world. The artificially built world is a prototyping platform for the very designs that define it, meanwhile those designs reciprocate in kind and prototype the world.