Session Chair: Aleena Chia
Presentation 1
MINDFUL AUTOMATION: TECHNOLOGY AND MEANING IN SMART HOMES
Naomi Jacobs, Sejal Changede, Adrian Gradinar
Lancaster University, United Kingdom
This paper outlines a programme of work which uses research through design approaches to explore the impacts of home automation on ritual, meaning and embodied practice. Rather than the current focus on utilitarian outcomes related to industry and efficiency, we suggest that automation in the home may have bearing on identity, spirituality and mental wellbeing.
We suggest that as connected technology and automation becomes more embedded in the context of the home, consideration must be given to how this impacts on meaningful practices that require embodied, tangible experience and action. These may be religious or spiritual in nature, such as use of the Lakshmi jhadu (grass broom) as part of a morning sweeping ritual in rural Indian households. Alternatively, they may also be related to cultural and interpersonal meaning such as creating a physical cassette mix-tape to give to a loved one.
We ask: how is value and meaning in embodied ritual practice impacted by intervention with digital technologies in the home? Can borrowing principles of traditional ritual practice support sustainable and meaningful smart interventions to home life?
Presentation 2
Moody Apps: Technologies of Gendered Mediation
Holly Avella
Rutgers University, United States of America
In popular wellness, self-tracking through media technologies has become both entertainment and lifestyle. The mood ring has given way to mood tracking apps, used measure our moods against the demands of contemporary work and relationships. This paper uses critical qualitative analysis to comparatively analyze three popular “femtech” hormone-based mood tracking apps centered around women that exist to apprehend and manage not specific moods, per se, but moodiness, or the gendered tendency toward vacillations. This analysis of moody apps reveals how technologically managing mood can work to mediate gender itself. Moody apps are shown as a space where tensions play out between conceptions of mood as an internal spirit and as an object that can be manipulated and commodified through technologies and where potentially subversive susceptibilities to mood swings are both managed and made mobilize-able in various ways. While Moody Month and Hormone Horoscope both work on biological models of mood, the former claims to subvert (while continually invoking) pathological models of mood, focusing on alternative wellness for individual betterment, while the latter enlists biological research in framing itself as life coach and relationship counselor. Female Forecaster, the third app designed for men to track women’s hormones, begs the question, who is any of this for?
Presentation 3
In the shadow of LLMs: Trouble in the “smart” automotive industry
Alex Gekker(1), Sam Hind(2)
1: University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; 2: University of Manchester, United Kingdom
This paper explores the tumultuous landscape of the modern automotive industry, once heralded as the epitome of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications through the promise of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The introduction of large language models (LLMs), notably with ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, marked a turning point, casting shadows over the ambitious goals set by major tech and automotive players. Notable failures, including Ford's shutdown of Argo AI and Volkswagen's struggle with electric vehicle transitions, have led to a crisis in the viability of connected and autonomous driving.
The paper identifies four central types of limitations contributing to this crisis: technical, economic, financial, and regulatory. Technical limitations expose the inadequacies of autonomous vehicles in meeting their promised capabilities. Economic limitations highlight the unsustainable nature of platformizing automotive operations, linked to innovations like vehicle subscription models. Financial limitations point to the speculative investment decisions that underpin technological projects. Regulatory limitations showcase the industry's renegotiation of conditions in response to safety concerns.
By examining these limitations, the paper establishes a conceptual framework applicable not only to the automotive industry but also to current discussions surrounding LLMs. The lessons drawn from these challenges contribute to a broader understanding of the perils and limitations within AI sub-industries.
Presentation 4
Chinese Smart City, an organic entity in the age of AI: A genealogy of Chinese smart city metaphors
Jie Shen
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, The
Since the 1980s, Chinese cities have been built based on the image of a mechanized city. Maçães perceives them as a product “in the age of mechanical reproduction”, repressing "genuine spontaneity; the stirrings and desires of life”. However, with the increasing integration of digital and intelligent technologies in Chinese cities, smart cities with a new image are rising. They are imagined as organic entities, a human brain, namely "City Bain". The City Brain is anticipated to sense what happening in the city in real time and make overall decisions. More importantly, the organic smart city is expected to dedicate to serving the people.
These two contrasting images represent a shift in Chinese visions of intelligent technologies' role in society. In contrast to mechanic cities, the organic entities concerns more about citizens' role in an intelligent environment and how this intelligent environment reconfigures the governance mode. Then the questions are: What does this organic metaphor mean, why it has emerged, why it is so important that local government even made a regulation centering this metaphor?
Through the combination of the fieldwork and discourse analysis, this work studies the genealogy of the discursive developments of Chinese smart city metaphors. AS a result, this study identifies the hidden historical undertakings and societal strivings behind current metaphor of organic entity. This work also casts a light to the shift from mechanization to intelligentization in China, by analyzing and outlining the features of the intelligent transformation in China.
