ThingsCon Salon - Workshop - Mapping Contestability Loops

On 5 September, ThingsCon will team up again with the Human Values for Smarter Cities project to organize a Salon linked to the research project. This time, we are guests at AMS Institute in Amsterdam. We focus this meetup (and workshop) on participatory design for machine learning.

This meetup RSVP is especially for the workshop!

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 systems that include 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?

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.
The workshop runs from 16:00 to 18:00 and will be dedicated to a workshop shaped and moderated by Kars Alfrink, a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft, specializing in contestable AI. The workshop has limited capacity.

Kars Alfrink is a designer, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of emerging technologies, social progress, and the built environment.
Currently, Kars is a postdoctoral researcher at Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on contestable artificial intelligence.
Before coming to Delft, Kars was active as a design consultant, design entrepreneur, and design community organizer for 15+ years.
Some highlights include co-founding and coordinating Tech Solidarity NL, a grassroots community of Dutch tech workers who seek to advance the design and development of more just and egalitarian technology; founding and co-directing Hubbub, a boutique playful design agency; and initiating and co-curating the Dutch offshoot of This Happened, a series of events about the stories behind interaction design.
Kars has worked as an educator and researcher at the Utrecht School of the Arts and as an interaction designer at several web agencies before that.
Kars holds an MA in interaction design from the Utrecht School of the Arts (2002), and a PhD from Delft University of Technology (2024). He lives in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

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After a break for drinks and food, we will continue with the evening program from 19:00 to 21:00. These speakers will discuss the workshop results and share their thoughts on the topic.

• Evelien Zengerink from the City of Amsterdam Computer Vision team
• Geke van Dijk, strategy director at STBY, a pioneering service design studio

The ThingsCon Salon will take place on 5 September 2024 from 16:00 to 21:30 in Amsterdam

Please RSVP via this workshop (16:00-18:00, doors open 15:45). You don't need to RSVP separately for the eventing program at 19:00.

Be aware
If you would like to participate in the workshop, you need to RSVP via the dedicated listing for the workshop (including the meetup).

(Image adapted from Contestability Loops for Public AI, concept Kars Alfrink, designed by Leon de Korte)