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 – 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.

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.