ThingsCon Salon Participatory Machine Learning | Sept 5th, 2024
Events
On September 5th, 2024, the Human Values for Smarter Cities project will once again team up with ThingsCon to organize a Salon featuring a meetup (and workshop) focusing on participatory design for machine learning. The event will take place at the Marineterrein, in Amsterdam.
Don Quichot in the Smart City?
In this ThingsCon Salon, we will explore the changing roles of designers in contemporary developments involving human values and smart city technologies. As Kristina Höök and Jonas Löwgren suggest, when faced with complex sociotechnical fabric that includes AI, designers should consider their work as “interventions into ongoing transformations over which they have limited control” (Höök & Löwgren, 2021). What implications do this statement and our experiences in state-of-the-art participatory design projects have for our work?
Program
16:00 – 18:00 | Workshop: Mapping Use-time Contestability Loops
18:00 – 19:00 | Break for Food & Drinks
19:00 – 21:30 | Meetup: Don Quichot in the Smart City
Workshop
We will start with a workshop in which we redesign an existing enforcement computer vision system with AI, not by focusing on efficiency or effectiveness. Instead, we focus on AI that helps improve citizens’ opportunities to prevent making mistakes or making appeals.
Mapping Use-time Contestability Loops
Designing urban AI systems can be an overwhelming task. There are many parts and actions to consider, and keeping them all in your head is hard. When we want to design these systems responsibly, we must consider them as a whole. Furthermore, when we want to ensure the contestability of the system at use-time, we need to be able to “see” the system to figure out where best to intervene. In this exercise, we take a technique from the field of service design called “service blueprints” and use it to map out our system and its contestability loop at use-time.
The workshop has a limited capacity of 20 participants and will be shaped and moderated by Kars Alfrink, a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft, specializing in contestable AI.
Meetup
After a break for drinks and food, we will continue with the evening program from 19:00 to 21:00. Three speakers will discuss the workshop results and share their thoughts on the topic.
- Evelien Zengerink from the City of Amsterdam Computer Vision team
- Vera van der Burg, PhD at Delft University of Technology in exploring AI as tools for self-reflection
- Geke van Dijk, strategy director at STBY, a pioneering service design studio
RSVP
Please RSVP via the links below. *Note: the workshop has a limited capacity of 20 participants.