Tech Beyond the Myth¶
Undoing Design’s Black box
These two weeks were dedicated to exploring FabLab tools and community, deconstructing pre-acquired knowledge or stigmas that kept knowledge hidden, building fast prototyping skills, understanding the politics of technology and inquiry about the tech industry. It was empowering as I was quite oblivious to the reality of the tech industry. I had been twirling inside these systems unaware of their imposed blockages on the consumers in a weird state were I was the owner of the techonologies but only until a the tech company allowed me to be. I did not think of my rights as a tech consumer, until now. I am glad I questioned, pushed myself and deep dived into what Victor, Guillem, Eduardo and Santi thaught us.
The ups and downs were constant and of great amplitude! It was a roller coaster and I wouldn’t change anything. What follows this introduction is just a glimpse of what happened with some extra commentary at the end.
7/11 - 18/11 week by Carolina Almeida
The Forensic Report details how we disassemble the coffee machine, why its designers made some odd choices (ex: bulky outwear and small hardware, materiality); patent and history of the artifact; assumptions and reality and our final thoughts and conclusions about the object as a reflection of another decade.
Sadly, the current power systems hold companies and the capitalist mentalities as their higher interests. However, there is power in knowing this. The system and the biased algorithms are games that can be played for the greater good. On the 9th of November, I visited CCCB for a screening of Ex-Machina by Alex Garland and a commentary by Ana Freire. Ex-Machina is a movie I cannot recommend enough, but the commentary by Ana Freire (PhD in Computer Engineering, lecturer and researcher at Pompeu Fabra University) opened my horizons. Ana is leading the STOP project (Suicide prevenTion in sOcial Platforms), “the objective of this project is to apply Artificial Intelligence to social media data to discover suicide-related patterns: suicide ideation, depression, and eating disorders. We explore behavioral, relational, and multimodal data extracted from social media and develop machine learning models to detect risk patterns. All our data is anonymized to protect the privacy of the users”. It was a great event to attend during the first week of Tech Beyond the Myth. It was interesting to see how a non-human tool that is controled by humans, will perform as the humans who have had instructed it.