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Tag: co-creation

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Society

Who are the real stakeholders?

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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  • 1 Comment on Who are the real stakeholders?
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“Co-imagine the future with the people hurt by the present.”

— David Dylan Thomas as quoted by Antonia Malchik

See also: Designing a future based on the biases of the past

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To whom go the spoils by Hamilton Nolan

It is certain that AI will unleash vast productivity gains, enabling the automation of once time-intensive tasks. Now, think of all of the stakeholders of corporations: Investors, executives, employees, suppliers, the community, etc. To whom should these productivity benefits go? … Such an increase is the equivalent of profits. Profits go to investors. That’s how it works.

(I’m not sold on AI bringing meaningful productivity improvements once you consider the errors and blandness that need correcting, but aside from that, yeah.)

See also: Who does AI work for?

This is not to say that a four day work week is unachievable. It will be achievable the same way that every other meaningful gain for workers is going to be achievable: through worker power. Companies must be forced to do these things. They cannot be convinced to do these things via appeals to their better nature.

See also: Wage stagnation vs corporate profit

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Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to Be a Better Journalist by Ed Yong (NYTimes)

In this status quo, people are expected to ignore the threat of infection, pay through the nose if they get sick and face stigma and ridicule if they become disabled. Journalism can and should repudiate that bargain. We are not neutral actors, reporting on the world at a remove; we also create that world through our choices, and we must do so with purpose, care and compassion.

See also: The Ableism of Abandoning Disabled People to COVID

The patient-centric approach is sometimes dismissed as advocacy, which is positioned as antithetical to journalism. In fact, it’s simply good journalistic practice to give weight to the most knowledgeable sources.

See also: Pro-democracy journalism

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Over 70% of Drivers Are Speeding in WA School Zones, Illustrating Speeding Epidemic by Ryan Packet (The Urbanist)

“One of the additional alarming findings is that some of those people who are speeding through school zones are actually the people connected to the school,” [Mark McKechnie, the Washington Traffic Safety Commission’s director of external relations] said. At Northwood Elementary, even out of the drivers who were specifically recorded as entering or exiting the school property, 70% were exceeding the 20 limit, with more than half going 25 mph or more.

See also: People will keep dying to cars until we decide their safety is more important than cars’ convenience

Using Positive Culture Framework for Traffic Safety

Article pairing: electric cars won’t save us

Categories
Featured Future Building Society

Finding enough together

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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  • 18 Comments on Finding enough together
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I don’t believe a climate resilient lifestyle must be one of deprivation. I dislike emphasizing less as inherent to our response to climate change because in so many ways, changes to address climate change will make our lives better.

Unless all you value is material trappings and broadcasting your social status through those goods. I don’t fault people who think that way now since this is a standard means of signalling in our society. But we need a new way to signal success and achieve happiness besides material accumulation. We need a cultural shift around the values that lead people to want a bigger house, a bigger car.

Though I don’t write much about climate change directly, it underpins nearly everything I’m thinking and writing about.

When I’m writing about labor, I’m writing about climate change.

When I’m writing about food, I’m writing about climate change.

When I’m writing about new technology, housing, community, I’m writing about climate change.

Climate change is a crucible for societal change. Climate impacts are woven through our society — everything we do affects how much carbon we release. That means the values that influence our choices must align with what is best for the climate. To tackle climate change, we must move our mental frameworks away from scarcity and towards a new view of abundance.

Continue reading “Finding enough together”
Categories
Food Memoir

Read Small Fires

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Read Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

Cooking is thinking! The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook’s subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to intellectual fulfilment leads directly out of the kitchen. In this electrifying, innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation.

Drawing on insights from ten years spent thinking through cooking, she explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative intimacies of shared meals. Playfully dissolving the boundaries between abstract intellect and bodily pleasure, domesticity and politics, Johnson awakens us to the richness of cooking as a means of experiencing the self and the world – and to the revolutionary potential of the small fires burning in every kitchen.

Feminist food writing, where have you been all my life? 😍 I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did. Lots to think about, even if it doesn’t all totally come together. The writing is raw, visceral, forceful, the author exposed, a very embodied text. She advocates for the cultural value of recipes and explores the meaning of cooking in relationships and community and identity. She has a totally different perspective on writing recipes than I’ve encountered, integrating experience and mood and all the little things that go assumed (the thing that always gets me: should the smashed garlic and the halved onion be peeled?).

Continue reading “Read Small Fires”
Categories
Outreach

Watched Best Practices for Applying DEI Principles to Marketing Communications and Engagement

Watched Best Practices for Applying DEI Principles to Marketing Communications and Engagement from pnsma.org

Multicultural marketing and community engagement are evolving. Today’s most successful multicultural outreach strategies are increasingly those that apply core diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) values to reach diverse audiences effectively, respectfully, and meaningfully. In this session, we will explore how DEI and multicultural marketing and community engagement can work together to create more equitable campaigns and programs and share proven best practices for applying DEI principles within the context of marketing communications and engagement.

Speakers:

  • Jennifer González (Senior Vice President of Multicultural Communications, C+C)
  • Alejandro Paredes (Co-Director of Communications and Engagement Services, Cascadia Consulting Group)

Turning DEI into Action: A Simple Framework

presented by Jennifer González

Organizational DEI = internal

Multicultural marketing = external — “sells products or services to audiences of multiple ethnicities or cultural backgrounds in authentic ways that honor cultural differences”

How does DEI fit into multicultural marketing?

DEI in multicultural marketing: “applying core DEI principles to marketing & outreach strategies to ensure we reach diverse audiences effectively and respectfully”

  • diversity — unbiased representation of diverse community members
  • equity = fair access — investing in resources that ensure fair access to people who need more support than others
  • inclusion = belonging — voices and desires of all community members are heard, valued, and acted on
Continue reading “Watched Best Practices for Applying DEI Principles to Marketing Communications and Engagement”
Categories
Activism Art and Design

Politicized Design: escaping oppressive systems with participatory movements

Watched Politicizing Design from the Grassroots by Bibiana Oliveira SerpaBibiana Oliveira Serpa from Futuress

Drawing from popular activist movements in Latin America, this talk explores the possibilities for the politicization of design.

In her PhD thesis that she recently defended for the Design program of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (ESDI/UERJ) in Brazil, Bibiana delved into her experiences as an active member of different civil society grassroots movements to reveal some of the political, ethical, and practical issues that permeate the transformative action of these collectives.

Through Militant Research Methodology and inspired by her action in the fields of popular education and feminism, she traced paths for a possible politicization of the Design field. In this conversation, Bibiana shares some of the lessons she learned from this journey, articulating four axes she considers crucial for the politicization of Design: ontology, epistemology, practice, and content.

Presented by Bibiana Serpa, a PhD visual designer from Brazil

Design & Opressão (Design and Oppression Network)

Articulação de Mulheres Brasileiras

What is militant research?

  • aims to educate people politically
  • participatory — cannot only research
  • acts in the “context of discovery” not “context of justification” — not seeking to support an existing theory, but to learn
  • always collective

Process of politicization

social movements are self-educating and self-transforming –> politicization

politicization = political learning — “a relational and experiential process”

Continue reading “Politicized Design: escaping oppressive systems with participatory movements”
Categories
Science

Rethinking the way we publish science

Liked The dance of the naked emperors by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

To recap, I argued in my last post that:

1. We’ve published science lots of different ways for a long time, and universal pre-publication peer review is both pretty new and historically strange.

2. That system doesn’t seem to accomplish the goals that it claims to or that we wish it would.

3. It’s worthwhile to try other things.

That’s also why I’m not worried about an onslaught of terrible papers—we’ve already got an onslaught of terrible papers.

Sick burn 😂

But seriously, it is not good for society or science when access to scientific research is limited to academics. This only reinforces the perceived division between academics and the public, and exacerbates anti-intellectualism. And, it is hardly helpful for scientists to be silo’d away from the public either — any insular group will miss out on the perspectives and wisdom of other groups of people with different backgrounds and experience. Shifting the expectation that papers should be readable by laypeople would encourage plainer language and force writers to clarify their explanations.

If science weren’t hidden behind expensive paywalls, people outside academia could draw on the latest research for decisions, and participate in conversations about science. Codesign is on the rise in community engagement and graphic design; improving access could enable communities to give input to projects and future research. Instead of researchers coming up with projects on their own, they could listen to the needs of the community to fill in gaps (for example, the gap in medical research for women).

Also learned a new concept, weak-link problem, from his referenced article The Rise and Fall of Peer Review:

Why did peer review seem so reasonable in the first place?

I think we had the wrong model of how science works. We treated science like it’s a weak-link problem where progress depends on the quality of our worst work. If you believe in weak-link science, you think it’s very important to stamp out untrue ideas—ideally, prevent them from being published in the first place. You don’t mind if you whack a few good ideas in the process, because it’s so important to bury the bad stuff.

But science is a strong-link problem: progress depends on the quality of our best work.

See also: Imagining a better way — for everything

Categories
Outreach

Notes from the SPARKS Conference 2022: Day 2

Misinformation as an Obstacle to Science Communication

by Brian Southwell at RTI International

What is scientific misinformation? from Southwell et al for The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science:

  • publicly misleading info that is misleading or deceptive relative to best available evidence at the time and
  • counters statements by actors who adhere to scientific principles without adding accurate evidence for consideration

What’s the problem with misinformation?

  • we are biased towards acceptance — we listen and then filter / think about it, which sometimes doesn’t happen sufficiently because we’re tired etc.
  • there are reasons we share misinformation — we signal belonging with others by sharing info related to our identities
  • our regulatory approach (in democracies) focuses on after-the-fact detection and response — does not censor info, prevent misinformation from being shared
  • correction is hard
  • emotions make us vulnerable — anger makes us more likely to accept misinformation
Continue reading “Notes from the SPARKS Conference 2022: Day 2”
Categories
Future Building House

Designing a future based on the biases of the past

Liked Why the ‘Kitchen of the Future’ Always Fails Us by Rose Eveleth (Eater)

In a world full of incredible technology, why can we still not imagine anything more interesting than a woman making dinner alone?

Writing off all these hypothetical kitchens as nonsense ignores how powerful the effect of their messaging can be.

Gender role stereotypes are so obnoxious — even though in my household I am the one who cooks. We went to an open house in the fancy part of our neighborhood once just to see what it looked like inside. The realtor chatted with us, and as we’re walking out the door, he points at my husband and tells him, “She wants a new kitchen, and you’re gonna pay for it!”

😶

[Engineers and designers] operate on the premise that people don’t know what they need until it’s built for them. This is a useful principle in some ways, but when it comes to reconsidering how people interact with spaces and appliances they use every day with fluency, it results in an approach to innovation that only calls for talking, never listening.

The result is an array of potential futures that are strangely both unaware of the culture from which they spring, and at the same time constrained by it.

A “we know better” perspective? Here’s another opportunity for co-design.

Solving for problems with technology is exciting / venture capital-izable, while the more common “boring” problems that make a kitchen easier to use probably involve: improved storage, simpler / easier cleaning, and lower maintenance.

What would my dream kitchen have that I don’t have now?

  • A counter depth fridge with freezer on the bottom, not the side –> stop food from getting lost in the back of our fridge
  • An induction stovetop (currently have electric coil 😢) –> easy to clean stovetop that I won’t burn myself on
  • A hood range that actually vents outside –> healthier indoor air quality while I’m cooking
  • More counter space, especially next to the stovetop –> more room for mise en place / less stressful cooking
  • An easy-to-clean, low-maintenance countertop (currently have tile 😭) –> cleaner countertops that don’t always look grimy like tile grout
  • An easier-to-use pantry (ours has wire shelves that stuff falls through, and the shelves are too deep to see everything) –> less annoyance, easier access
  • Storage that’s easier for a short person like me to reach and use (I can’t reach half of the cabinet where we keep cups) –> less annoyance from lugging my stepstool around
  • Appliance storage so I don’t have to heft my heavy stand mixer up from floor level –> would use my appliances more often
  • Somewhere to store cat food (right now it’s in overflow storage under the stairs) –> save myself a trip down the hall

I could currently buy any of these things, if I had the money. No new inventions required.

New kitchen inventions I would like:

  • A blender that’s not a pain in the ass to wash.
  • Dishwashable non-stick pans.
  • Knives that hold their edge like carbon steel but don’t rust or react with red veggies.
  • Storage for tupperware — an apparently impossible problem 🤣

We’ve now lived in our house ten years without remodeling the 1988 kitchen 😂 Sure, a new kitchen would probably work a little better and be prettier. Yeah, I have a Pinterest inspo board, but I can admire pretty things without buying them. And how many hours of my and my husband’s lives do I really want to trade for a fancier kitchen?

See also: The Politics of Kitchen Design

Categories
Technology Writing

Bias is baked into the current state of AI fiction writing

Bookmarked Wordcraft Writers Workshop (g.co)

The Wordcraft Writers Workshop is a collaboration between Google’s PAIR and Magenta teams, and 13 professional writers. Together we explore the limits of co-writing with AI.

Interesting assessment of co-writing with an AI — it’s limited by its inability to perceive / remember context, a very generic, stereotyped and mainstream understanding of genre and stories, and mediocre prose without voice.

Allison Parrish described this as AI being inherently conservative. Because the training data is captured at a particular moment in time, and trained on language scraped from the internet, these models have a static representation of the world and no innate capacity to progress past the data’s biases, blind spots, and shortcomings.

The computer trying to insert a man into a lesbian love story 😬 We see time and again technology incorporating and reflecting real world biases. It feels like they think preventing bias is an afterthought, something that can be fixed after the fact. These tools will likely become quite important in the future.  Can someone integrate people of color and queer people into their design process upfront?

I am intrigued by co-design, and feel like this project could benefit from it: learning upfront from writers what their biggest struggles are and where they wish they could have assistance. This feels a bit like, “we made a thing that makes words, let’s have some actual writers try it out and see what they do with it 🤷‍♀️”

One thing that writers often need is bit part characters. With existing biases, will the AI suggest all straight white men to fill these roles? When they create characters of color will they be caricatures?

Again, the training set proves itself essential to the tool — and behind many of its failings.

I read Robin Sloan’s short story, which was a clever little work that capitalized on the program’s strengths while critiquing reliance on shortcuts (and maybe poking a bit of fun at GRRM).

Categories
Personal Growth Self Care Society

Finding joy by rejecting a scarcity mindset

Liked WHY MISERY LOVES COMPANY (AND HOW TO AVOID BECOMING BITTER) (aestheticsofjoy.com)

When we view our lives through the lens of abundance, we live in a state of flow. Success is not taken from others, but created with others.

Like the idea of “an abundance-based community” — her example is authors, who “realiz[e] that readers are not a scarce resource to be squabbled over, but a community to be cultivated. The goal is not to get people to read one book over another, but to get more people reading period.”

I dig the rising tide lifts all ships idea, even if it’s hard to remember sometimes with my own work.

[S]top saying “I’m so old,” which effectively hides another scarcity statement: “I have so little time left.”

Oops, I am guilty of this 😅 She’s got a point though…