HealthTech: Today and Tomorrow Past Event
Presented by ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society
Tickets
Date
10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Venue
HealthTech: Today and Tomorrow Past Event
Presented by ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society
Who gets to design new healthtech products? Who are these designed for? How can we do design differently and more inclusively?
This hands-on creative workshop will explore how emerging technologies such as automated decision-making (ADM) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being designed, understood, and imagined within contexts of health and wellbeing, and what better and more inclusive futures can be developed. ADM and AI technologies are predicted to have a profound impact on health practices and medical care globally, with applications ranging from diagnostic and therapeutic to lifestyle and social wellbeing. Popular narratives position these technologies in often wildly variable ways: e.g., as replacing human doctors or as evil robots. Such portrayals partly result from the fact that ADM and AI technologies are poorly understood: there are no widely agreed upon definitions or explanations of these technologies.
We invite participants to join us in reimagining healthtech and its futures through cultural probes. These will involve writing and image-making to reflect on the social contexts of their own technology use: for example by mapping the relationships between people and the things that they feel matter to their health and wellbeing (see our concept image). The activities will also involve designing some speculative healthcare ideas: for instance by creating a manual that unpacks the ‘black box’ of a futuristic AI device. In the process, we will work through critical issues of trust, social impact, inclusiveness, wellbeing, ethics and explainability. Together participants will experiment with sociological design methods that offer an alternative way of understanding and materialising the social and material contexts of health technology design and use, both in the present and into the future.
Presented by Ash Watson, Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society
Participants
Ash Watson is a sociologist of fiction and technology. She works with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, based at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia. Her research explores how emerging technologies are imagined, designed and implemented across contexts of health and wellbeing. Ash is author of the sociological novel Into the Sea (2020), creator of the public sociology project So Fi Zine (sofizine.com), and Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review.
Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor is a media artist and emerging technology researcher. He is also a postdoctoral fellow with the UNSW Sydney Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Vaughan’s practice explores the different ways that site-specific art and emerging data practices frame site and materiality. He has exhibited both internationally and nationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Plimsoll Gallery (Tasmania), The Condensory (Queensland), Museu de Aveiro (Portugal) Holocenter (NYC).
Deborah Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia. Her research is interdisciplinary, spanning sociology, communication and cultural studies. She is located in the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre, leading both the Vitalities Lab and the UNSW Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Lupton’s current research interests bring together more-than-human theory with innovative research methods.