DATA AND ALGORITHMS AS MATERIAL

As interaction designers, we use color, typography, icons, and sound to bring an experience to life. Data and algorithms are the materials that affect how a user experiences AI—its personality, biases, and idiosyncrasies.

In Committee of Infrastructure, data is used to explicitly reveal bias and the shortcomings of relying on AI to make decisions. Bias is a serious issue with real-world consequences, but speculation allows for designers to play out bias in absurd and imagined ways. To conceptualize how this meeting might take place, a city council transcript was created using the Karpathy char-rnn machine-learning algorithm [ 6] (Figure 4). The algorithm learned from seminal texts important to the ethos of each organization participating in the meeting [ 7].

The language created is awkward and direct. The algorithm’s narrowness undermines the difficulty of consensus building, central to civic dialogue and to the meeting’s progress. However, the transcript does effectively display how an AI might interact with humans and other AIs. In addition to the verbal arguments of each organization, sets of video evidence (machine vision with image classification) reveal each organization’s motivations. Specifically, computers classify moving objects and assign value to each object, creating a hierarchy that allows for communication between vehicles, people, and animals to avoid collisions.

PETA’s video, for example, prioritizes
AI. The good aspects of bureaucracy
(e.g., checks and balances) can act as a
way to negotiate with AI that works at a
human scale and sense of time.

Committee of Infrastructure imagines four different groups of stakeholders that advocate on behalf of their organization in a city council meeting (Figure 1), wherein humans and AIs negotiate with each other.

Stakeholders include engineers, city council members, presidents, AI experts (machines), smart roads, and sensors who express conflicting positions, ideologies, and motivations (Figure 2).

The project purposefully positions these imaginary human and machine stakeholders arguing among themselves to demonstrate how this absurd scenario might become a reality. Discussed at the meeting: a ballot measure for the removal of traffic lights to create a fully autonomous intersection. Smart street lights, autonomous vehicles, and embedded sensors will sense objects, things, and people through machine vision and proximity detection, allowing for open communication and for vehicles to efficiently move through traffic (Figure 3).

speculation to create tangible products and fictional scenarios that serve as catalysts to discuss present issues by “collectively redefining our relationship to reality” [ 5]. For example, their project United Micro Kingdoms (http://umk. techamigo.net/), completed in 2013, envisioned four fictional societies organized on a spectrum of ethical and political positions, proposing how a future society would implement sustainability, collectivism, and surveillance. Their project highlights what speculation offers design: the opportunity to propose new realities that aren’t bound to the technical limitations of the present and to provoke a dialogue about how we want our society to progress. When envisioning new realities, designers must remember to question techno-determinism, the assumption that all technology is good because it is capable of solving problems. Designers, developers, and researchers must work to evaluate whether or not their work actually addresses their defined problem space while respecting the user and the environment in which their creation exists.

 

COMMITTEE OF INFRASTRUCTURE: AN AI DESIGN PROVOCATION The new realities that designers are tasked with envisioning make space for the introduction of human values, such as humor and play, while addressing the moral and ethical uncertainties of implementing AI. My recent project, Committee of Infrastructure, is a design provocation that interrogates the issues of agency, representation, and bias. The project explores a need to scrutinize how governance will change with the introduction of AI. Specifically, it considers how humans and AI systems interact with each other in a civic setting to negotiate issues pertaining to a local community. The project also argues for the introduction of civic dialogue as a model for interaction with

The project purposefully positions
these imaginary human and machine
stakeholders arguing among themselves
to demonstrate how this absurd scenario
might become a reality.

Figure 3. The diagram illustrates how the intersection will work after the removal of traffic lights at Sunset Blvd. and N. Alvarado St.; proximity sensors, speed sensors, and computer vision will work together to account for and govern the different types of traffic (vehicular, pedestrian, cyclist, and animal).

Smart Streetlight
Computer Vision
Speed Sensors
Autonomous Vehicles
Computer Vision
Speed Sensor
Children
Sensor Embedded Clothing
Accelerometer + Gyroscope
Sensored Bicycle
Computer Vision
Speed Sensor
Animal Tracking
Computer Vision