Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Johanna Koljonen – Closing Remarks

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:16:38 GMT

Johanna Koljonen closes 2023's The Conference with a recap how we as participators have tried to move away from oppositional binaries but also reflects that how these binaries also work as an aid to understand the world. Not only that, we are also able to shift and remix the the meanings of these opposites. Remembering a recent conversation at The Conference where she got to question "what is professionalism?" she suggests that maybe we, when we allows us to be human, discovers a lot useful skills we can use in what we do. If we can celebrate our differences, our personal stories and backgrounds in our work life maybe we also find new perspectives and tools to create the change we wish to see.

Nick Hasty – Inferring Creativity

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:16:10 GMT

Examining the creativity of generative artificial intelligence tools brings up interesting parallels with human cognition. Just as AI systems predict and fill gaps, our brains do so too, drawing from a wide range of learned behaviours, experiences and beliefs. Both entities heavily rely on their training data: AI on diverse datasets, humans on factors like personal histories, culture and upbringing.

Of course, creativity is not only a generative optimisation tool developed by our homo-sapien ancestors in order to survive. The frictions and surprises that occur in the creative process provide valuable data for better informing our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Nick uses the metaphor of a therapist to reframe the potentials of human-AI collaboration. Just as a therapist does, these tools can help humans to unpack, twist and turn concepts to aid better understanding and make meaningful breakthroughs. The results are often new and surprising (the essence of what creativity is all about.)

Nick ends with some hopeful predictions for creative expression and that it can lead to more creative, inspired and poetic results. Ultimately, AI can help us to better learn what it means to be human.

BITOI – Ingen fara

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:15:51 GMT

BITOI stands for Bass is the original instrument. BITOI are exploring the boundaries of the voice and the electric bass. The band is made up of one electric bass player and three vocalists from Denmark and Sweden (Cassius Lambert, Alexandra Shabo, Lise Kroner, Anja Tietze Lahrmann). They are working with an extended electric bass neck to allow quartertones and the lyrics of tracks are based on phonetic pronunciations of bird sounds, leading to a unique sound that transcends borders. Some tracks feel mythical while others feel very contemporary.

Q&A – Tending To Transformation

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:15:24 GMT

Q&A from the sessions Tending To Transformation – For Creative Leaders Who Stay With The Trouble with Pernilla Glaser (Author, Educator), Lydia Slaby (Community Leader and Author) and Holley M. Kholi-Murchison (Oratory Glory)

Holley M. Kholi-Murchison – Towards Satiety: Charting New Paths for the Work...

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:15:04 GMT

“Are you willing to dig deep and choose what your heart wants in the face of fear?”

How can we begin to view the work that we do as a journey towards self-actualisation? Holley began in their own journey of resignation from a toxic workplace, to found Oratory Glory, and has continued to work in spreading stories and helping people find meaning in their life and work. Many people find that they don’t fit into the boxes that those around them expect them to fit in, causing them to shrink themselves. Their ideas and their aspirations. Finding your own narrative can bring you back towards finding meaning in your life and in your work.

Holley delves into the importance of doing the work on yourself, in order to find self-actualisation in your other professional life. Reflecting on why work is important to you, what aspect of yourself you want to develop, and what your heart is yearning to do, will all move you towards a place of where we understand who we are. This leads us to becoming a better person in any place of work or interaction. Dare to be inconvenient, different, and work with things that make your heart sing.

Lydia Slaby – Soft Leadership Learned the Hard Way

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:14:42 GMT

“Take time to pay attention. Not everything can be solved in 15 minutes, let it take the time it takes”

“Stay in the hard and uncomfortable conversations”

Lydia Slaby learned the hard way that to live a life that is worthwhile, you need to find space for the heart and the brain. At the end of a long-list of achievements, and on a trajectory towards immense corporate success, Lydia suffered a cancer diagnosis that shifted her understanding of achievement. Moving from the corporate lawyer world, toward community based leadership, she found the beauty in letting a person be fully human, all the time.

You, or your colleagues, will go through things in your lives that forces you to change. Life is, and will be messy and humans are and will continue to be imperfect, and as leaders you need to let them be just that. You won’t always be able to receive total clarity from someone, because sometimes it just isn’t there. Instead of viewing people and workers as machines of productivity, listen, learn, and see the whole of them. This will take time, but in the end letting the emotional, intuitive instincts blend with the rational, and controlling, will create leadership that lets people be people.

Pernilla Glaser – Heart Matters

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:14:31 GMT

“We all start out as artists”, Pernilla Glaser explains. After all, most of us know how the snow eaten from a mitten tastes. We started out as open for experimentation, doing weird things, feeling and exploring the world and the relationships around us. Pernilla invites us to find ways back into this state, and to put more attention to our heart and not just our brain. The best way of hosting a playdate between the heart and brain is by actually inviting more play into our lives and reminding ourselves that we are always part of a web of relationships.

Play can help us imagine and actualise a different world, “a world you can imagine is reality halfway there.” Sure, our current society is not particularly great in supporting us in doing weird, playful and loving things but Pernilla explains that play can create reality. “Matters of the heart can take us to the heart of the matter”, meaning that if we can let our heart support and guide us through the challenges of the polycrisis we find ourselves in, we will be better equipped to manage the many webs of messy, difficult and complex relations we are intertwined with.

Q&A – Creative Assemblages

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:14:04 GMT

Q&A from the session Creative Assemblages – Emerging Alliances to Augment Human Creativity with Kristoffer Ørum (Artist) and Kader Bagli (RISE | Visual Effects Studio)

Kristoffer Ørum – Even Images That You Know To Be False Affect You

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:13:49 GMT

Kristoffer Ørum finds satisfaction in taking a particular technology that is meant for something else and misusing it. In his current unfinished Instagram project that unfolds over time, the artist uses AI to create a version of history. The generated pictures combine 90s hip-hop culture, the Danish worker movement, fishermen's culture, and the health care system. But the more you look at it, the more you notice its imperfections. That is Kristoffer’s way of imagining and reimagining the past. Why? Because any discussion of the past is a discussion of the future.

We need to rediscover our own imagination. Kristoffer criticises the lack of imaginary futures and our incapability to get out of the future narratives dictated by tech giants. Also, the “horrible shitshow” that is social media, where we constantly get bombarded with fake and manipulated images, contributes to that problem. So he hopes that with projects like his that play with past, future, and (re)imagination, we can regain the power to imagine futures not defined by tech monopolies.

Kader Bagli – Bringing Nuanced Futures to Life

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:13:36 GMT

“We all deserve to be seen in visual languages. We already have the tool, now it’s about taking action”

Could merging VFX and AI create a fully represented world? Kader Bagli certainly thinks so. Working at the intersection of creativity, imagination and technology, she is exposed to a lack of diversity on a daily basis. Our current visual storytelling landscape doesn’t celebrate cultural diversity across all layers of society – we are good at marginalising groups instead of normalizing them. But the good news is: we already have the tools to change that; we just need to put it into action to unstuck ourselves.

With AI putting a halt to our lack of imagination and VFX offering storytellers new perspectives, the future looks hopeful. Because we all deserve to be seen — on screen and off — with dignity, humanity and no judgment. So, what are we waiting for if that’s what it takes to change our visual language to a more inclusive one?

Q&A – Humanity, (AI)mplified

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:11:49 GMT

Q&A from the session Humanity, (AI)mplified – The AI Tools We Use to Be More Human with Laura Herman (Oxford Internet Institute,) Ovetta Sampson (Google) and Charlotte Högberg (Lund University)

Charlotte Högberg - The Doctor is In: Assistive Intelligence in Healthcare

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:11:28 GMT

How can AI be used for the common good or more precisely in healthcare? Charlotte’s work explores what futures are possible and desirable but also what we are at risk of losing. AI's role in healthcare can have harmful effects but also huge potential benefits. She emphasises the need to raise vital questions and consider consequences. Awareness of nuances, understanding risks and avoiding unethical technology is key because this touches upon high stake decisions (literally about life and death).

“We need to be in the often uncomfortable spaces in between - at least for a while”

Constant critical engagement and trust calibration is needed because there are no quick fixes for these new emerging issues - for example how much can we augment until humans are only operators - and is this something we want to strive towards?

She closes her talk with a both hopeful and cautious remark. She advocates daring to dream of AI-specialist collaboration, while maintaining agency, responsible exchange and upholding medical ethics and common goals.

Ovetta Sampson - Design Principles for a Pluralist Automated Future

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:11:12 GMT

"Data is the love language of machine learning, but we must remember that it is not true."

We all create data. And all data is created by people. Ovetta Sampson wants us to remember this, both in order to centre humanity but also to clarify the vulnerabilities of data. We are biased, so the data we create is infused with biases as well. Whether it is by the sin of omission or the use of inequitable variables, traumatised datasets manifest in real world situations such as applying for a bank loan or decisions made on housing and education.

Ovetta urges particular caution for the encounters between humans and machines in the era of AI and machine learning. It's not Skynet, not yet, but ceding decision making responsibility to such systems can lead to harmful consequences. The best way of countering these resides in responsible, human-centred design frameworks which capture the minimum viable data, maintain balance in the exchange of what people give and what they receive, and include iterative privacy by default.

Ovetta ends with a rigorous set of responsible design practices to combat the amplification of our human biases by AI systems.

Q&A – Doing Equity

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:10:05 GMT

Q&A from the session Doing Equity – Tools for Making Diversity, Equity and Inclusion more...Inclusive with Peter Bilak (Typotheque), Caroline Bollen (TU Delft) and Dr. Nighat Arif (BBC, NHS)

Dr. Nighat Arif - Treating Women Where They Are

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:09:48 GMT

“What happens when you don’t have the words to describe the symptoms?”

In the last installment of the ‘Doing Equity’ session, Dr. Nighat Arif, the resident doctor of BBC and ITV presents an uplifting talk that reiterates the importance of raising awareness and in normalizing discussions of female health within the Black and Asian communities in the UK. From menstruation to menopause as well as breast cancer – she states that there are still a lot of stigmas and shame attached to talking about these health concerns. Which is made even more complicated with the language boundaries as well as the unavailability of words in the different ethnic languages.

“Why is that women who look like me and sound like me are not being listened to?”

When she gets together with women from these communities, such as at a mosque, she often hears stories about how doctors assume that menopausal symptoms don’t apply to them. Specifically, the mental symptoms of menopause – such as brain fogs, being forgetful, etc.- are often ignored and the women are given antidepressants instead.

So how does one address this gap of knowledge in female health that exists not only in the Asian and black communities in the UK, but also in other cultures in the world? What steps can one take to normalize this important discussion in inclusive ways? One of Dr. Nighat Arif’s creative answers to this is through her use of TikTok alongside the use of memes and gifs to reach out, educate, and engage in not just English, but also Urdu and Punjabi.

Caroline Bollen – Design With and For Empathy

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:09:12 GMT

“Empathy is the balance between identification and differentiation”

In this session ‘Doing Equity’, we dive into the aspects and practices that can be adopted in order to materialize equity in different settings. An interdisciplinary researcher at Delft University of Technology, Caroline Bollen whose research focus revolves around how to best understand empathy in a society where communication is more and more mediated by technologies.

Through dissecting what empathy connotes in multiple definitions, we find ourselves in her conceptualization of empathy which oscillates in a state of balancing identification and differences. She further explains that as a society, we have the tendency to reduce empathy to certain social, narrow norms, such as good or bad.

Utilizing Reddit’s ‘Am I the Asshole’ subreddit as an example of how technology can be used to facilitate collective constructive feedback, it gives the chance for users to connect, empathize, and imagine themselves in the shoes of others.

“Communication technology is like meta-empathy.”

Peter Bilak - Giving Voice to People

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:08:45 GMT

“I wish there were governments who paid for this”

Peter Bil'ak is a well-known name within the narrow field of typography and type design. Having worked for many years digiitising handwritten scripts from South Asian regions, he shares some of the implications of digitally missing and incomplete alphabets. While the global population is growing very quickly, the number of spoken languages is simultaneously shrinking. As education and other systems become standardised, languages that aren’t even properly documented don’t stand a chance.

With examples from both India and indigenous Canadian societies, Bilak explains how linguists and designers need to leverage technology if we want to be able to save some of these languages and scripts. Because if they disappear we risk losing a lot of localised knowledge. In Canada, Syllabics include a group of 40 different languages. Several of them are incomplete on computers, meaning some people cannot even spell their names. And in India… no one even knows how many languages there are in total.

Optimisation of font software and the Unicode framework are vital for these marginalised languages. Working with the community is the only way to make things happen, says Bilak. One such result is the November Type System: a versatile and accessible collection of fonts based on the needs of readers of hundreds of languages in South Asia.

Q&A - Setting Stories Free

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:08:13 GMT

Q&A from the session Setting Stories Free – How We Tell The Tales That Move Us with Priyanka Borpujari (Award-winning journalist), Bjarke Calvin, Sophia Jörgensen, Iben Völund (Duckling), Building a legacy for 21st-century journalists Marie Kilg (Deutsche Welle).

Bjarke Calvin, Sophia Jörgensen, Iben Völund – Building a Legacy for...

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:07:49 GMT

“Our world is connected by stories” says Bjarke Calvin. For him stories are not just a way to share information but a way of nurturing human connection. So what to do with the fact that news stories we interact with are more and more defined by social media? Tech-giants that dominate the media space, do not foster storytelling as their primary goal is generating advertisements. .

To free stories from the linear, centralised format that we are currently trapped in, we need to hack the current system.

“Before news was just something we consumed, now we got to be part of it.” explains Iben Völund, a high school student and collaborator of Bjarke. Using the Duckling App the students wrote and published their own stories.Iben and Sophia explained that reading a story created by someone their age is more interesting. They are more directly related to their own experiences. Packaging stories for the younger generations is important. As the students explain during the talk, online news articles look boring for them, “there needs to be more images, videos and probably some special effects.”

Making the stories more accessible means finding strategies better than paywalls to curate news, and learning from other ways of finalizing news stories.

The Duckling team believes that if we could wrap the stories differently, it would give agency to the younger generation. News does not need to be boring and fear-inducing, it can be hopeful.

Marie Kilg - Collaborating with More-Than-Human Columnists

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:07:26 GMT

Anic is not like any other writer. Anic is the first non-human columnist and while Anic is not a human they still have parents. “We saw ourselves comfortable in the role of parents, as we wanted to grant Anic as much independence as possible but we still had to create certain rules that had to be maintained.” Marie Kilg is one these parents and her collaborators created Anic as a sort of an investigation looking at what it would mean if an AI writes articles, in her talk she shared their learning and reflections.

Through this fictional exploration of Anic the AI-columnist, the team realized that despite what many of us may fear, AI cannot write stories. “There is a lot of human labor at every step of the process”. And while it is impressive what level of poetry and emotions an AI generated text can entail, “that is still just humans feeling the human feelings'', Marie explains. We as humans project our emotions onto an object that does not have any. Furthermore Mari underlines that AI does not have any agency that still belongs to the people who use it. And while it is easy to anthropomorphise machine learning algorithms, and attach some kind of intent to it, we humans are responsible for each step of the process in one way or another. AI is a tool and we should treat it like that.

Priyanka Borpujari - Empowering Complex Narratives

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:07:14 GMT

“In every conflict the first thing to go is truth, and the first killed victim is the messenger.”

“Editors are not interested in mundane stories because we have stopped listening entirely”

Who decides which stories get to be told? Who defines what an important story actually is? Priyanka Borjupari shares stories of her experiences as a journalist in all parts of the world, and her views on how storytelling affects the way that we view what’s important and what is not.

Many aspects of our world, like countries and the people around us, are ascribed meaning whether we want them to or not. Those meanings create presumptive stories that inform us how things are, and tend to make us forget that what actually connects us is the mundane. We all have a similar aspiration to have a better life for our loved ones and ourselves, and that is what ultimately connects us. Current gatekeepers of stories, like large magazines, newspapers and editors, all decide what’s important based on their presumptions, but what about telling stories of the mundane human experiences?

The future of journalism should allow for the nuances in being human. After the pandemic, an event that connected and affected all of humanity, we have a unique opportunity to fight and uplift new types of stories, and let people and nations be many things.

Q&A – Memory in The Machine

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:06:21 GMT

Q&A from the session Memory in The Machine – The Tools We Use to Archive Us with Carl Öhman (Uppsala University) and Neef Rehman (Creative technologist, Isometric)

Neef Rehman - Machine Forgetting: Memory as Instruction & the Fallacy of Time

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:06:10 GMT

“The anthropomorphisation of AI is not the way to go. It is more interesting to look at how that impacts our interaction and perception of time.”

What does time look like for machines? Do machines understand time the way humans perceive it? And what happens when we rely on machines that have their own view of the world and on us? Neef Rehman discusses how the concept of time is unique to us and shaped by the people around us. But in an era of increasing interdependence, time as we know it — fluid, fallible and social — is challenged by generative, non-reliable agents that blur the past and the future.

Machine Forgetting is a phenomenon that we need to remind ourselves more of, argues Neef. Why? As we rely on our extended network of technology and learned machines to remind us of memories or events, we must accept that these agents are not as shiny as they present themselves. They are messy, biased and will forget things — just like humans. So let’s not spend time feeling gaslit by these agents but radically accept that no one has certainty over memory.

Carl Öhman – The Ethics of Our Digital Afterlives

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:05:56 GMT

“The data of the dead is more than individual user history, it is the heritage of the 21st century.”

By the end of this century, Facebook will host 5 billion profiles of deceased people - and therefore have access to data of more people who are dead than alive. That poses an urgent question: What do we do with the digital dead?

Since the agricultural revolution and the settlement of humans, the dead have been around us. They are a portal to our past, and we continue to feel connected to them. Due to the digital revolution, the people who die now also leave a digital footprint. That leads to a question of morality: What do we do with this enormous amount of data? Who owns it, who accesses it, who deletes it? Who can profit from it economically? All of this is more than a question of individual user history but the actual heritage of the 21st century. So, how do we treat this primary source of information that we pass down to the future?

Should we really let 1-2 tech companies gatekeep the access to our collective digital past? Should we grant families access to our data after we die? And can we influence which version of us will be displayed after our death? Carl Öhman encourages us to think about these questions because even though you may not care about your data after your death because you are dead, there are various reasons why you absolutely should.

Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:05:10 GMT

“Injustice it’s not rooted in computing. It’s been happening for hundreds of years and it’s still being imposed through centuries in violence through colonialism.”

“Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level”. This is one of the 10 principles for design justice that Costanza-Chock presents in her keynote, which is essential listening for middle-class gender-normative designers. We might be blind to the burdens imparted on less privileged individuals, but if we think more about the implications our devices, interfaces and systems have on everyone, we can get far. That’s the message that Costanza-Chock has for us.

There’s no one “best” approach to design problems – “I’m not looking for the systems to be less biased”, they say. Because we’re living in an historical time where there’s a slow sea-change taking place. The Design Justice book from 2020 presents concrete examples of how marginalised peoples are disproportionately burdened by existing systems and technologies. Designers, activists and developers alike can learn from and be inspired by the Design Justice Network to engage in liberating system design. Because the root of the issue is the structural inequality that reproduces this ‘matrix of domination’, as Patricia Hill Collins defined it in Black Feminist Thought. There are huge interlocking systems of oppression (from capitalism to white supremacy) and design justice is a concrete framework for beginning to tackle these age-old issues.

BITOI – Fly, fly + Tubarao

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:04:58 GMT

Q&A – Michael Slaby

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 16:40:35 GMT

Q&A from the keynote session with Michael Slaby (Avens, Harmony Labs)

Johanna Koljonen – Opening Remarks

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 10:26:58 GMT

Returning moderator extraordinaire, Johanna Koljonen, opens The Conference 2023 and extends a warm welcome to the participants. She begins with a reflection on the personal financial situation that many of us have faced due to last year's economic turmoil. She states, "Working in this economy, we're facing a lot of pressure that we previously have not experienced," and connects environmental threats, financial anxiety, and the unease of social securities, all leading us to a state of prolonged worry.

However, Johanna acknowledges that even as a "constant worrier," there comes a point when there isn't enough time to worry. She continues, emphasizing that even if we reach a state of "compassion fatigue," we must never let it turn into "solidarity fatigue." We can just hope that these anxieties and fears remain unexploited by dark interests as she reminds us that even though we may need to put on our oxygen masks first in case of an emergency, we still have the power to act and help others. It is in times like these we need the practical work of change, which, in turn, is the practical work of hope. Perhaps you'll find something of it at The Conference.

Q&A - Enacting Care

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:33:46 GMT

Q&A from the session Enacting Care – Putting Sustainability Into Practice with Deb Chachra (Olin College), Becky Lyon (Artist) and Ledama Masidza (Oceans Alive)

Monika Bielskyte - Protopia vs TESCREAL Visions of Tech Rapture

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:33:13 GMT

In what kind of future would you like to live? Blade Runner or Black Panther?

For too long, our futures have been determined by immature science fiction imaginaries still stuck in the mid to late 20th century. Their utopian and dystopian binaries now provide fertile inspiration for police-state-aesthetic VC pitch decks and a cluster of ideologies known as TESCREAL: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Moreover, many of these past narratives have not recognised the richness and diversity of knowledge, experiences and worldviews.

"Those who control the fantasy, control the future."

Monika Bielskyte identifies the cost of such grand visions, whose utopianism has historically had its roots in exclusionary and eugenic principles. For a more positive and productive way of seeing the future, Monika’s vision of Protopia is radically hopeful and inclusive. Protopia is grounded in plurality, interdependence, embodiment, biosphere regeneration, creative flourishment, spiritual fulfillment, and evolved values. By including the voices of those that have been purposefully previously erased, Protopia changes the nature of leadership and creates the possibility for interesting things to happen. Monika ends on a hopeful note:

“Different worlds have existed, and they could exist again”

Ledama Masidza – Weaving a Tapestry of Community for Ecological Care | The...

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:32:34 GMT

“We can only manage what we know.”

Ubuntu is a concept that embraces the interconnectedness between all living things. No one is independent of the fact that our existence is directly dependent on the care between human and nonhuman communities. Ledama shared a story of hope, the case of Kuruwitu, a fishing community in Kenya that managed to heal itself from impacts of overfishing, coral bleaching and climate change. They did this through collaborative care, and harnessing the collective intelligence of their community.

Ledama mentioned some key success factors that led to Kuruwitu healing the devastation of marine life they had experienced, one of which was knowing the community. Understanding who lives there, allowing everyone to contribute, and harnessing the knowledge of their shared environment. Opening a dialogue with marine ecology through ocean data as well as having a sensitive understanding of the incentive models of the human community in Kuruwitu created caring approaches for both. Holistic solutions require collective intelligence, which in turn requires multiple experiences to be heard.

Debbie Chachra – How Infrastructure Works

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:32:22 GMT

“Energy is general purpose freedom.”

“The earth is in a void, every atom has to come from some place, and go somewhere.“

Infrastructure might not be the first thing we think of when we hear the word “care”, but these systems are manifestations of how we ensure quality of life as a society. Debbie Chachra refers to a quote of Amartya Sen - “We want wealth not because it's desirable on its own, but because it gives freedom to actually do what gives life value.” In her talk Debbie pointed out that the wealth of a country can be measured by the amount of money put into infrastructure. In fact a satellite image of the earth in some ways reflects wealth simply by showing the amount of artificial light present. Debbie Chachra sees artificial light as pure agency as it allows us to do things we would otherwise not be able to do.

If we take it a step further, energy is a general purpose freedom as having access to it allows you to exist with ease in your day to day. The issue is that the main source for energy we have harnessed are fossil fuels bringing us in the state of climate crisis we find ourselves in today. The speaker invited us to take a look at our lovely planet as a place that gets an immense amount of energy from the sun every day and also a place that exists in a void. Meaning every atom has to come from some place, and go somewhere. Debbie Chachra asks us to rethink the idea of energy that is limited, and the ideas of material resources that are not. To create caring infrastructure futures we need to commit to decentralized infrastructure for regenerative energy and build careful relationships to material flows.

Becky Lyon – A Carrier Bag for Care-Full, and Co-flourishing Decision Making

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:31:01 GMT

“The master's house cannot be rebuilt with master's tools.“

“A physical shift with our bodies can shift how we think about a problem.”

In her talk, Becky Lyon reminded us that we need to get back to our bodies, in order to create a world where we can thrive. In the dominant European American system the body has been estranged in favor of the rational, the evidence-based and the narrow. It caused us to step outside of ourselves, placing the notion within us that nature is outside of ourselves. What Becky encourages us to do, is to return to the body. If we reintroduce the body to make the change that we want to see, it can return our intuition closer to our core selves. Perhaps this can alter the gated and guarded power structures that currently exist.

As a part of the toolkit for care that Becky presents, she encourages you to map the “enmessments”, meaning to map all the interconnections, flows and entanglements surrounding you. Understanding the complexity allows for more care-full decisions. The audience was at one point invited to act out an act of care, opening space for lightness, humor and laughter. Embracing joy and play brings us back to our bodies, and helps us enact care into our daily lives. Lastly, as Becky said, practice here is key, so go out and do it.

Timothée Parrique – How to Blow Up an Economy

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:30:49 GMT

When everyone else calls for economic growth, innovation, and addition, Timothée Parrique demands demolition, sabotage, and removal. Our strive towards infinite growth is not sustainable on a finite planet. So far, no economy in the world has managed to grow its economy without overshooting the planetary boundaries. That’s why we need an economic strategy based on subtractions, not additions. And we need to rethink the economy's purpose, as growth tells us nothing about prosperity and well-being. So, is de-growth the solution?

Timothée advocates for a planned, selective, and temporary downscaling of production and consumption. Mainly because the alternative, growth-obsessed capitalism, is a total collapse. And if you want to lose weight, you would want to diet gradually over time rather than chop off a leg, right? Let's come in like a wrecking ball and discuss how an economy can prosper without growth — because that is the ultimate innovation.

Dr. Eduardo Castello Ferrer – Blockchain, Robotics and Economic Autonomy

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:30:36 GMT

Have you ever met a self-employed autonomous robot artist? Introducing Gaka-chu ("painter" in Japanese), a 6-axis robot arm that creates artistic paintings of Japanese characters. While robots have historically been treated as labour, Gaka-chu explores the concept of claiming agency and economic autonomy using blockchain-based smart contracts.

So, can robots actually maintain themselves? And if so, what implications do these economically autonomous robots have? Eduardo argues that instead of treating robots like tools, they have the potential to become peers. At the same time, robots, like Gaka-chu, now have access to economic resources without being part of traditional business entities. Would you acquire a piece from Gaka-chu and hang it on your wall?

Jenny Grettve – Feminist Economies

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:29:32 GMT

With severe catastrophes happening around us constantly - ecologically, economically, as well as socially - we tend to feel hopeless. But hopelessness is for the privileged. Our fear makes us hold on to things we already know instead of pursuing new things. We feel lost and want to think that crisis happens elsewhere - climate change does not affect me or my loved ones. But it actually does: When climate injustice happens somewhere, it happens everywhere. And as human beings, we have to act on it.

For Jenny Grettve, the answer is kindness. Addressing problems caused by selfishness, like the climate crisis, calls for a philosophical and psychological approach. As human beings we need to be genuinely caring, always and everywhere, to create a supply chain of kindness. And we need to pursue a more feminist, matriarchy-based way of thinking in the economy. But how can we implement more kindness in our daily lives? And how can we pursue a more circular economy that is not based on hierarchies, domination, power, and wealth, but perceives everyone to be equally important? Let’s create the butterfly effect of kindness!

Cassie Robinson – Emerging Futures: Patterning the Third Horizon

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:28:46 GMT

Cassie Robinson
Associate Director of Emerging Future at Joseph Rowntree Foundation

“There’s always something growing and declining at the same time. I am ending and beginning at the same time.”

From external events such as the pandemic to the hyper speed development of AI and tech to the increasingly urgent climate crisis discourses, how do we navigate ourselves in the midst of all these life-changing events? Are all changes – particularly the ones that liken to the ending of a cycle – inevitably bad? How can we adapt accordingly and create pathways to what’s to come?

Using an array of frameworks, Associate Director of Emerging Futures and founder of Stewarding Loss, Cassie Robinson is of the belief that endings can be done better.

“The systemic transition is considering it as making good compost – composting improves soil, it provides nutrients, it stimulates the ecosystem, it builds up.”

Robinson’s frameworks aimed at the UK public sector and organisations like the NHS. But during the Q&A aspects relating to private companies also surface..The idea of hospicing endings might seem alien or unnecessary in profit-driven systems. But these rituals are natural part of our culture - from the personal to the organizational to the societal – and here Robinson expands on the work of e.g. Vanessa Reid.

Liselott Stenfeldt – The Senses of Belonging

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:24:41 GMT

“People don’t change behaviour just because you tell them too. People need innovation in a public space to change”

“Space and life goes together, and it's important to work with them together.”

“Wise cities are making the invisible visible” and the ways we can make it visible means listening and looking at a variety of different data sources. Liselott Stenfeldt is the head of research and development at Gehl, a company which has been playing a leading role in understanding and supporting public places as a platform for community, life and culture to thrive. The main theme in Gehl's approach is to pay attention to complex stories places in the city have to tell us.

Liselott pointed out that it is important to have a diversity of data sources and kinds of data we employ to understand how hot makes our cities more filled with life. It is important to look at traffic data we can get from satellites or sensors but it is also crucial to work with more emotional and subjective data of the people living in a place. Gehl has been developing different methods to incorporate both of these datasets in their work. In this talk Liselott Stenfeldt shows 3 use cases on how the invisible can be made visible by asking people to make pictures of urban spaces and describe their sense of belonging to them or to record the sound of daily life and the emotions connected. This type of data is not really easy to work with, but by combining it with other information it shows a bigger picture. It is even more significant if there is an opportunity to give a voice to people who usually are left out of how public spaces are designed. This provides a unique opportunity in making sure people can meet and spaces are filled with life.

Ling Tan – Why Participate?

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:23:48 GMT

“Work with people who disagree with you and with each other and still work together. This is where participation can begin.“

“Reflection to time and place is important to make people participate.”

How do we get people to participate in creating the cities that they want? And once we do, how do we get them to act towards a common goal? These are some of the questions that Ling Tan works with on a daily basis and addressed in her talk.

In order to create collective action, meaning getting people working towards one common goal, it’s crucial that you are sensitive to what participants will actually get from providing their time. Will their community gain any benefits? If so, which ones? Another key aspect is having participants feel agency and ownership over the issue that they are trying to overcome, and then being a part of the solution. They want to be able to see and understand what results their efforts are yielding, and for that to happen they need to understand the problem. Ling pointed out that there needs to be more sensitivity to what kind of communities we are including and how. For example the climate movement in the UK is not really focusing on addressing different cultures present in the country. In the talk we see an example how the climate conversation can be shifted to by showing the example of the project Low Carbon Chinatown.

To succeed in understanding how people in cities can contribute to creating the future Wise Cities, you need to embrace messiness. Go outside of your comfort zone, and meet people that are different from you, agree to disagree, and work with them anyway. This will broaden your understanding of not only the people who inhabit the city, but the issues that they are interested in solving.

Arnaud Grignard – Tangible Interfaces For Urban Spaces

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:23:36 GMT

“The goal is to share knowledge through open-sourced tools, and for people to use them as much as possible”

In his presentation, Arnaud Grignard shared some of the work he does with his team at the City Science group at the MIT Lab, specifically a tool called City Scope. The common thread for all examples was how this tool made it possible to use data visualisation to analyse patterns and potential outcomes when developing cities. By building physical representations of cities, and projecting data onto the city, it’s possible to visualise behaviours on a large scale, such as movements of people and vehicles, and alter them to analyse the effects. One of the shown examples was a project analysing the effects of air-quality on depending on the way people in a city commute, giving a clear visual and physical representation on what it entails to take the car, public transport or bikes.

City planning can be quite abstract and complex and open-source tools like City Scope can help make the abstract more concrete. It can contribute to the democratisation of these types of analytics, and can be used as a way to communicate otherwise often overwhelming and complicated data to new types of shareholders.

But the most important thing that was pointed out, was that since this type of modelling is an open-source tool it’s available for everyone, at any time. These types of tools are available to us, so we should be using them as much as we possibly could in the planning of our cities.

Q&A – Imagining Institutions

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:22:54 GMT

Q&A from the session Imagining Institutions – (Re)making the Pillars of a Liquid Society with Dan Lockton (TU Eindhoven) and Anne Kaun (Södertörn University)

Dan Lockton - Plural Imaginaries In an Age of Crises

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:22:08 GMT

How can we think about institutions differently? In a world of competing fictions, imaginaries are one our most potent resources. Dan Lockton wants to get imaginaries out of people's heads and into a shared space - to do things differently as a result. He has a few ideas about how to do so.

Metaphors are central to our imagination. They have the power to harm, to limit, but also to create. So, in the quest to reimagine institutions, Dan proposes the creation of new metaphors, and has created a toolkit to assist doing so. The prompts aren't guaranteed to provide the perfect answer, but the friction of unexpected combinations prompts us to think, reflect, and create new mental models for many of the issues we encounter in the world today. How could tree bark be a metaphor for our institutions? Or a lamppost, covered in fading A4 pages, their staples rusted from the rain? Other tools available to us include practices of visualisation, modelling, and creative foresight.

In the reimagining of institutions, Dan emphasises the importance of paying attention to whose voice is heard and whose is not, broadening the input, and ensuring that a wider conversation is had about what role our institutions play in our evolving world.

Anne Kaun – Automating Welfare: Interfaces and Backends of the Digital...

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:21:57 GMT

Reimagining public infrastructures and systems has the potential to enhance accessibility and usefulness for diverse groups within society. Instead of taking a starting point in creating digital tools (which is often the case), Anne Kaun suggests looking into the frictions that emerge in the use of digital platforms and infrastructures.

Anne stages a scene, drawn from her real-life research to exemplify marginal stories of problems with navigating digital platforms and services. Imagine a woman who struggles to submit additional information in a digital welfare service application. At the institution's service centre, she is instructed by the staff to click through the platform and follow the steps. Digital self-help, as they say.

“Even with digital tools, life will never be a smooth ride”

Stories and scenes like this, can show us discrepancies and imbalances of power, practices and opportunities. They are examples of situations when people are left out. Digital infrastructures have different functionalities and consequences for different people. The great intention of providing fully frictionless and smooth digital welfare services for everybody is simply not realistic as there will always be groups that will face inconveniences or limitations in using them. Instead of striving for a perfect solution that fits all, Anne suggests leveraging these frictions to collectively imagine a system that provides for diverse needs and capabilities.

Michael Slaby – On the Possibility of a Utopi-Yin Path Forward

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:20:50 GMT

What if the cracks in our social and civic institutions are not signs of collapse but the first signs of transformation? Let’s face it: We’ve been living in an overly masculine society focused on dominion, growth, labour as a source of dignity, achievement as our basis of meaning and productivity as our key to purpose. But it’s a tale as old as humankind — and one we’ve put on to ourselves as a survival mechanism. Now, it’s on us to stop being at odds with nature. It’s a role that no longer serves us as it keeps snapping back at us like a rubber band with anxiety and loneliness.

Michael Slaby explores Ursula K. Le Guin's path of Utopiyin and Utopiyang as a way out. A new balance requires us to choose more feminine wisdom and leadership for now. Better yet, if we forgive ourselves for our estrangement and move ourselves back into nature’s systems, we can embrace the world through a lens of openness and connectedness. And that’s what being human is all about — isn’t it?

Audrey Tang – Alignment Assemblies and Collective Intelligence

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:19:37 GMT

With the nuclear bombs detonating in 1945, Pandora’s box was unlocked. For Audrey Tang, Minister of Digital Affairs in Taiwan, Artificial Intelligence represents another box of Pandora that challenges us to think about how we can avoid the pitfalls for society and achieve collective global action. We as a society have a choice: Are we going to tumble into the abyss of abuse, manipulation, threat, cyber attacks, and deep fake, or are we going to embrace shared values, democracy, and global AI cooperation?

Global AI governance, as pursued and advocated for by Audrey Tang and Taiwan, builds on consensus and public participation in policy-making, recognizing the role of AI for good purposes. Alignment Assemblies, a pilot project of the Collective Intelligence Project, aims to sync technologies with societal values and wants to reduce the fear of AI through a participant-guided conversation about needs, preferences, hopes, and fears. In this aspect, open source and Alignment Assemblies are powerful catalysts for bolstering societal understanding. This is why Audrey Tang calls for all hands on deck to solve the Gordian Knot that is AI in order to free the future of it.

Q&A – Entangled Economies

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 17:50:06 GMT

Q&A from the session Entangled Economies - Creating Value with Generosity and Interdependence with Jenny Grettve (Anon, When!When!), Timothee Parrique (Lund University), Eduardo Castello Ferrer (MIT).

Q&A – Wise Cities

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 17:41:06 GMT

Q&A from the session Wise Cities – Architecting Vibrant Connectivity with Liselott Stenfeldt (Gehl), Ling Tan (Kakilang,Umbrellium), Arnaud Grignard (Université de Lyon / MIT Media Lab).