Materializing data bias (5)|FMP

Luchen Peng
4 min readNov 19, 2021

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1/8/21–8/8/21

It is necessary to personally try critical design before inviting participants for critical making. we decided to generate some ideas ourselves according to each three sectors: health, workplace and finance.

Some of my ideas:

  1. An expression training helmet to help you smile like an elite white man. The reason why I like this idea is it requires people to adjust their natural or cultural behavior to adapt the algorithm’s intervention in human affairs, which reveals the preference of the algorithm to a certain group in the application, and the dislocation relationship phenomenon” use and being used “ between humans and the tool in a satirical way.

2. Algorithm “Fengshui or Xuanxue” Book. Algorithm Bibe. This rough idea was simply inspired by the news “ How algorithms keep workers’s in the dark”.
This new express that food-delivery couriers knew the app collected data. What they didn’t know was how data was used to award them work.In response, they developed a range of strategies (or guessed how) to “win” more jobs, such as accepting gigs as quickly as possible and waiting in “magic” locations.
I was attracted by their special response, and it remind me of when I was playing some card drawing game. Lots of players will post their experience on how they draw high-quality cards, like having their character wear a red hat. But in fact, these actions are groundless. In Chinese social platforms, we called these actions and experiences Xuanxue in a satire way. Xuanxue is also taken to refer to astrology, geomancy, and other popular religious arts. another translation of xuanxue could be “learning of the dark”. I want to add these ridiculous behaviors in a guidebook to reveal people’s uncertainty perception to the algorithm’s complexity and dynamic. But I haven’t figured out how to derive this idea to expose data bias.

3. Black market experience store with full of hack products. This idea aims to provide a context where participants could experience how people live with data bias in the future mainly. This store could accommodate other team members or participants’ ideas.

Other group members’ ideas

Sylvester Liu’s idea :

An guide book help joobseeks survive in the AI hiring interviews, and an exhibition show perfect organ under the background of algorithm-based rule

Guide book and perfect organ ( Credit: Sylvester)

Tiana’s idea:

1. A healing pod reflects data bias in the medical area. A large part of the data of medical practice evaluation lacks enough female data, which will easily lead to the female illness not being recognized , thus leading to misdiagnosis. Therefore, This kind of invisible injury will gradually turn into visible, reflecting on the skin of the female body.

Healing pod ( Credit: Tiana)

Tiana’s other ideas

Recruiting Installation and A detournement. (credit :Tiana Robison)

The framwork of our final idea.

The rough final idea ( made by group)

Thinkings:

In the process of this creation, I have been perceiving what critical design is in my own way and what critical design needs to convey. Comprehensive case analysis and literature research, I prefer that critical design is the art conveyed by the way of design, Which is more about comment language, and it is important to express attitude rather than its functions. Therefore, In the workshop practise, We need to guide participants to show their feelings and attitudes when making critical objects, instead of commenting on the specific function and appearance of these objects.

At the same time, an excellent idea should be a logical speculation and preview rather than an absolute fantasy. How to express credibility is important.

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