„Prototyping For More Than Human Futures“
In this lecture, I will share some empirical and theoretical reflections on the notion of prototyping, proposing elements for a more-than-human and decolonial agenda on urban datafication processes. One of the main sources of pride of the promoters of the Smart initiatives that I have studied, is that their technologies are always humans oriented, promoting more human futures. The idea of human centred design is not only the bar used to measure “good design”. It is also the driver of various typologies of smart products, solutions, and innovations. I will propose the challenge of thinking about the digital beyond the anthropocentric notion of human-centred design, and repositioning the digital in the debates around more-than-human futures is an ethical responsibility. If Smart projects point to how to achieve more human futures, preferring white men and seriously impacting the nature of the planet, a challenge for decolonial design would be to prototype new urban experiences, assuming that futures are not exclusively designed by humans or for humans.
Martín Tironi is Associate Professor, School of Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He is sociologist, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2006. Master in Sociology, Sorbonne V, 2010. PhD, Center de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines de Paris, 2013. Post-doctorate, Center de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines de Paris, 2014. Visiting Fellow, Center for Invention and Social Process, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018. Martin Tironi’s research concerns digital sociology, design anthropology, the production and the maintenance of sociotechnical devices, and critical approach of smart cities and datafication. He is currently developing a research project (Fondecyt, 2021-2024) titled “Design Futures in the era of artificial intelligence and algorithmic prediction: problematizing the construction of technological futures in the Chilean context”. Before that, Martin developed another Fondecyt project titled “Datafication of urban environments and individuals: analyzing the designs, practices and discourses around the generation of digital data in Chile” (2018-2021) and Fondecyt project (2015-2018) on the circulation of the Smart City concept. His work has been published in The British Journal of Sociology (2020), Journal of Cultural Economy (2018), Environment and Planning D (2018), among others. Tironi was part of the curatorial team that won the gold medal in the London Design Biennale (2021) with the Pavilion “Tectonic resonance: from user-centered design to planet-oriented design”
On the lecture series: „Testing Infrastructures“
From QR codes used to verify COVID-19 vaccination status’ to cloud software used to train machine learning models, infrastructures of testing are proliferating. Whilst the infrastructures themselves come in different forms – from ‘off the shelf’ systems to tailor-made technologies – they all have a capacity to generate specific ‘test situations’ involving an array of different actors from ‘ghost’ workers to python scripts. An increasing reliance on digital platforms, protocols, tools, and procedures has led to a redistribution of testing itself: not just where testing takes place, and who performs the testing, but who has access to, and control over, mechanisms for testing, test protocols and of course, test results. In this lecture series, we focus on the practices making up the test infrastructures and explore different perspectives to make sense of the realities enacted by testing.
We invite our lecture guests to ask: how do testing infrastructures engender the construction of specific testing routines and practices? What kinds of affective experiences, reactions, and responses are generated through testing? Here we invite reflection on how testing infrastructures oft fade into the background, pointing to a tapestry of maintenance and repair practices. Lastly, what are the ways in which we can evaluate the role of digital infrastructures more broadly? This includes the challenge of what novel test methods can be developed and actually ‘tested’ to gain a better understanding of how infrastructures work. Our exploration of test practices in this context is interwoven with the search for test media that bind actors together or create barriers; that enable cooperation or declare it impossible.
Possible questions include (but are not limited to):
- What are the implications of testing in different social situations and in what moments do they come to the fore?
- When and where are tests conducted—for whom and what, through whom and what, and by whom and what actors?
- What are digital practices for/of testing and with what types of data do testing infrastructures support?
- What other practices spawn from distributed testing? Think of practices of passing and obfuscation within nested situations of testing and the outsourcing of ‘validation work’ as constructions that govern.
- What methodological strategies are there to make test procedures and their foundations transparent?
- Can different politics of testing be distinguished? If so, where and under what conditions?
- Can we demarcate between embodied testing and disembodied testing?
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