ThingsCon Salon - Meetup - Don Quichot in the Smart City

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.

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 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.

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 for the meetup via this meetup (19:00-21:30, doors open 18:30).

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).

More information on speakers via ThingsCon website.

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